Scripting News - Latest Comments in Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

haqu — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:35:33 -0000

After trying to use several popular URL shorteners, I decided to make my own. It is fast and clean, with simple stats -- http://go2.st

Feel free to suggest new features and improvements (twitter: @haqu)

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

haqu — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:35:05 -0000

I agree that it would be better if Twitter had it's own URL shortening service. But these days, we have to use third party services. Good news: we have a choice. Bad news: we have a choice.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

tojosan — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:09:28 -0000

Kottke has a great idea. I've long been concerned about the URL shorteners and their common use.

I'm as guilty as the next guy using them though. I try to avoid their use though when the tweet will be under 140 chars anyway.

Another solution would be for me to provide my own shortener as part of my blog. Perhaps a parallel domain, T.BB or some such.

At any rate, this will mostly fall on deaf ears. See my other comment about change.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Max — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:44:56 -0000

Of course it would, but that would only be solving part of the whole problem. I don't know how identi.ca, facebook status, yammer and other microblog apps solve this problem.

On the other hand, as I realised yesterday after posting my comment... How much of a problem WOULD it be if "shortening service X" (cli.gs in my case, I like the stats and the API) died tomorrow? I only use it for tweets anyway, and I consider tweets somewhat... let's say "temporary", anyway. If I want something to stick around, I'll post it to my blog; tweets are expendable.

So, Service X dies, heck, Twitter dies as well... How much do I lose in that case? Not that much, really.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

John Norris — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:13:51 -0000

Is there some sort of algorithm that can be applied to a URL to shorten it?
Then the shortening and lengthening could be done locally.
If the algorithm was known, it wouldn't go away.

OK, data formatting is not my specialty, so maybe I'm all wet.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:06:13 -0000

If Twitter did it itself that would solve the problem for Twitter.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

carlosduarte — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:03:19 -0000

Happy user here :)

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Max — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:54:59 -0000

"We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business."

"PS: Twitter could fix this problem right away if they wanted to."

If Twitter adds URL shortening, it too creates a problem if Twitter were to die. And it's not just Twitter either, FaceBook status updates aren't exactly long either.

No, the best way, I agree with Dave, is to do it yourself. Don't rely on some third party to do it for you, with the added risk of Third Party turning either evil or belly-up. Now all I need to do is get me a shorter domain name. =]

Speaking of third-party evil: the Disqus comment box doesn't allow me to enlarge the comment field in Safari. Well, it does, but then it just gets bigger than the iframe box (iframe? didn't check) it resides in. Ugh. If I *were* looking at Disqus for commenting (I'm not), this would turn me off.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

BuzzNova — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:29:04 -0000

If you have a wordpress blog, you can use this plugin to shorten your own links:
http://wordpress.org/extend...

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

dave — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:42:11 -0000

This makes total sense.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

vrypan — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:26:17 -0000

It also allows to back up your data.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Jeremy — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:12:36 -0000

An even better solution to the Twitter URL problem: In cases where shortening is necessary, push the shortened link only over SMS. The long link is fine on the web.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

carlosduarte — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:02:30 -0000

URLBorg.com allows domain mapping.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

JpMaxMan — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:32:10 -0000

You are always free to roll your own... http://www.hido.net/project...

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

kosso — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:27:55 -0000

The new digg.com url shortener does what I call 'Referrer theft'

Site owners will never know 'where' someone visited their sire 'from' as the HTTP REFERRER in their logs will only the show the shortened Digg url and not the url of the page the shortened link was clicked on.

I just tested it with a few shorteners, including my own.

I think this is really bad. And quite amazing for someone like Kevin (who is pretty smart) to do something like this.
Sure, the bar itself is quite cute with some cute features on it, but framing a site is the worst way possible.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Netweb — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:19:00 -0000

Dave,

If you still have a vested interest in http://bit.ly can you get that glue worked out with them?

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

kosso — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:47:51 -0000

I use my urlb.at shortener to shorten links made in the longer description field in Phreadz posts.

But the thing is, is that I don't 'store/change' the link in the database itself (as twitter does). So if I decide to switch http://urlb.at off, or it's down, the original links pop back into the descriptions. Also, when someone wants to edit their post, they see the original url they entered, not a shortened one.

Also, recently I have been running a script through my database to go and get the mime-type and title (if one exists) of every link it has. It's taking a while, but should be useful for things like search and in order to provide more info about the link being visited. (Though I haven't yet worked out exactly how I'll o that yet - probably from another parameter int he API.

By far the worst thing I have learned about creating one is the huge amount of spam links the API gets, many of which I have 'banned' in one way or another, simply returning the requested url to be shortened.

I built it orignally as an exercise. And since I have been recently improving it and adding the extra stuff like stats etc, I'm glad there's a discussion going on about it now. Here and on Joshua's blog.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

AAfter Search — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:45:57 -0000

I like your intention about the short URL portability, but at the age of Twitter/Facebook and increasing wall-garden, that may not happen.

We can reduce the one point of failure problem by having two short URLs. Web search engine AAfter.com already creates two short URLs at a time. Please, try us out, and give us feedback. We also have no problem to share our short url [aafter.us] database with any open source community. However, I am not following how 'use our own domain name' is going to work technically unless those domain points to our DNS server or every domains' .htaccess file is updated. Am I missing something?

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Link Fail — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:45:37 -0000

I dislike shorteners that frame the content with stuff that I don't care about. Here's an example of two of them: http://go2.me/36a

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

spinchange — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:26:45 -0000

Google could fix this problem faster...and that's just a little bit.ly scary, isn't it?

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

NigelBHall — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:10:18 -0000

Thanks a lot for the link. Going to give it a try.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

michael_s — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:07:34 -0000

This is a good debate to have as we have seen massive proliferation of shortened URLs services but let explore this a bit mroe:

*Lets start from the position where we don't put URLs up on a pedestal that need to be treated with religious deference --- the importance of pure URLs to users has been diminished -- in Japan advertisers don't include the URL on their billboards its simply go and Search for "Z"

* I would suspect that 80% or more of the non-spam URLs are generated by fairly reliable services e.g. TinyURL (been around for at least 8 years). Rather, what we may have is a situation where one or two services are too big too fail.

*By dismissing shortened URLs we are dismissing an idea that has been around in the physical world for 100+ years - you can buy a P.O. Box from USPS which redirects people to an alternative address. Do we really think that such a service should not find its way onto the web in some form.

*Applications that auto-generate URLs need to do so with caution (use reliable Tiny URL service) --- just as you wouldn't
use a third rate ISP or develop on a 3rd rate platform so to you shouldn't publish shortened URLs from unreliable or unproven services.

*Google and most other search engines practice some form of URL shortening in search ads: There is a display URL which is usually very different from the destination or landing page URL --- and when a user clicks on the display URL a Google URL is called. So on the one hand we are not being entirely forthcoming with the user about their destination and secondly Google is sitting in between the URL on the page and the destination much like these URL shortening services do.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

Chris — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:14:57 -0000

I have no issue with some URL shortening programs but what I'd like to see is an automated way to store the actual url in a bookmark service of our choice, both as safety & a bit more findability.

Cheers.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

James Kew — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:29:09 -0000

When that happens a large part of the web will die.

No it won't. Links rot all the time; the web survives.

(And I don't believe "a large part" of the web is built on short URLs, either. It might seem that way if you live on Twitter, but I don't and I don't see short URLs often.)

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

David — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:24:14 -0000

I'm not sure I understand the danger in URL shorteners from what has been states in this post. If you would mind would you go intonmore detail. Thank you!

David. ^_^