What's up with the #! in twitter & Facebook URL's?
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I was just wondering why Facebook and now Twitter have added "#!" into the url structure? Does this mean we should link to a twitter profile like this - twitter.com/profile - anymore?
Should we now be linking like this: twitter.com/#!/kevinbarnes
Kevin
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aka hash bang
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Highland is right, this is for indexing of ajax. I personally leave out the #! when linking, but that decision is based on I'm usually sending the link in email and those characters sometimes break the hyperlink.
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The short answer
The character
!
is added only for Google purposes, this notation is a Google "standard" for crawling web sites intensive on AJAX (in the extreme Single Page Interface web sites). When Google's crawler finds an URL with#!
it knows that an alternative conventional URL exists providing the same page "state" but in this case on load time.
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