DISQUS

Hanan Cohen · 2 years ago

In Israel, newspapers (emphasis on paper) publish links in print and some of them use tinyURL.

If any of them had their own tinyURL, they could get statistics on what links are actually used.

I don't know how newspapers in other parts of the world publish links. Maybe it's a good idea for them also.

Clay Newton · 2 years ago

One drag about url shortening is that you lose link love. Systems that use inbound links to calculate relative value don't get the benefit of the inbound links that have been shortened. This is sometimes used as a technique in intentionally *not* loving things you link to, but for those of us who link to things on services such as Twitter that have finite space, or links aren't getting counted.

Your Amazon Wii example solves that problem. The other factor in the Amazon crap-url is that it's totally unreadable by humans, which drives me crazy.

dave · 2 years ago

I once used TinyUrl to try to keep a post out of TechMeme, to no avail, it ended up on the top of the page. I even got called a whore (paraphrasing) by Mike Arrington for using this technique. :-)

tommorris · 2 years ago

Cool URIs don't change, and are well-designed. That's why "twitter.com/davewiner" is a better URI than "twitter.com/user.php?u=1234191723647ff848318273773af9". Shame the vendors didn't do that when designing the CMSes of yester-year. Oh well.

In an ideal world, short, well-designed, persistent URIs would be the norm. Until then, URI shorteners will exist. An alternative is to not put all one's URI shortening into one basket - have a simple API which would be available in all frameworks (REST, XML-RPC, SOAP/WS, JSON, Flash etc.) which would take a URI and farm it out to a random provider and return that. Decentralise and distribute the blast so a future TInyUrl would be less problematic.

Of course, using short, well-designed URIs would solve the problem in the first place.

Udi · 2 years ago

There's a lot of downside to link shortening. A good deal of information is lost in the process and we've just learned about failure problems. I wrote about this a long time ago with some proposed improvements w/ regard to adding some information back into the shorter url:

http://breasy.com/blog/2005/10/26/i-hate-tinyurls/

Gerard · 2 years ago

Amen. The people who need to do this the most are manufacturers. Why should I have to navigate through a broken website to find support or documentation for my product when I can punch in Manufacturer.com/Model. Sony.com/32S3000 gets you nothing while Sony.com/bravia forwards you to a site designed to sell televisions to new customers not to support existing ones.

Seth · 2 years ago

The only potential problem I can forsee is that the search engines use URLs as part of their calculation of relevance. If shorter URLs were the only URLs, I think you'd see some sights dropping in search results. If they're an augmentation to make life easier on users, I'm all about it. I wonder if my blogging software includes that option?

Eric Link · 2 years ago

I lean to apache rewrite to solve this at the app location, w/ help from code similar to this wordpress plugin. It looks interesting, allows mutliple rewrite formats (maybe tiny plus long w/ date etc?). Has anyone used this or similar to make apache rewrites easy? To provide both short and long urls? Is there an example out there like a wordpress plugin that provides a good model for this that could be adapted to toher apps (eg apache module? are there apache modules that do this already?). Please share your expxeriences.

Eric Link · 2 years ago

http://www.wp-plugins-db.org/plugin/advanced-pe...

Jeremy Bowers · 2 years ago

Why should a Twitter user worry about shortening at all? Twitter should automatically accept links, shorten them locally with a local service, and replace the URL with the shortened link. Then, after doing all that, apply the 240 char limit. Maybe it should only do that when the message needs it.

The best user interface is no user interface at all...

Martin Broerse · 2 years ago

I think we need resolvers like this to solve the problem:

http://purl.oclc.org/RSSLOOP/test/

http://purl.rssloop.com/RSSLOOP/test/

where purl.oclc.org and purl.rssloop.com are resolvers for /RSSLOOP/test/. Your browser will have to know what purl resolvers are but this is not hard to do. So even if rssloop.com is sold or down all links can be moved to a new domain without a problem. Just tell the resolvers where /RSSLOOP/test/ than has to point to .

Shivanand · 2 years ago

Long urls have a purpose. They can tell you the CONTEXT!!!!
http://www.zooomr.com/photos/shiva/sets/21619/ - link to a set of photos on zooomr owned by shiva
http://shvelmur.com/wpress/2007/10/20/loving-my... - someone lovin a canon 40d on 20th october 2007.

now, by shortening we are going to lose all that context. It is fine for an app like twitter, where I can annotate what the link is about, but when used in blogs, I would like a keyword with these urls, and wouldn't have to tell my users, what is the context of the content I link too.

Your thoughts?

Eric link · 2 years ago

I agree w/ you on the value of the context. I think apps should provide long permalinks w/ all the context for 'normal' use and short urls generated by themselves for use in media where 'size matters' (e.g. mobile sms where you have limited space)

Joe Lazarus · 2 years ago

Dave, I included a link to a service called Shorty in the comments on yesterday's post, but realized I didn't provide much context. Shorty does just what you're looking for. It's some code that any website owner can install on their machines that provides TinyURL functionality for that domain. Get Shorty here...

http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0824_a...

From the brilliant Khoi Vinh for the low low price of free. Funny thing is, I imagine TinyURL is more reliable than Twitter, so in their case they might be better off using the second server.

Dustin · 2 years ago

How are you doing your "tinyizing"? Just curious... I have a system using base 36, should give me plenty of possibilities...

dave · 2 years ago

Yup, the 26 letters of the alphabet and the numeric characters. It's at times like this that I wish my database had case-sensitive naming, that would give me another 26 characters to play with. But you get 26-squared 2-character names, and it's going to be a while before my URLs go to three-character names.

rnc · 2 years ago

http://decenturl.com/ is also really useful.

Alek · 2 years ago

You can use Apache's asis handler. Works just like static files, except that no headers are generated. Your file contain the headers in the beginning. Then put a "Location" header in there and you are all set. No need to use <meta>'s

Luke (sexyer1) · 2 years ago

In Twitter we obviously need short URL's when we've got something additional to say, as we only get 140 characters (not even as many characters as an SMS text message).

I agree this topic needs to be explored, but I strongly believe twitter needs to at least expand it's character limits at minimum to 160 characters (that of an SMS text message). I wish it were something more like 200 characters, it's not asking much is it? lol

I'm a big fan of this twitter style of communicating, I'm more likely to write a short message to those who want to hear it on twitter, then go the the trouble of logging in and doing a blog post etc. since joining twitter.

My point, as far as twitter + URL's is concerned, I think we need more room write a decent message and post a link, it's painful sitting around re-writing a short message again and again for 10mins to make it fit, while still being able to say what you want and post a link regarding the topic.

Doug Hellmann · 2 years ago

Should this be a function of the service itself, or the browser? It seems like some sort of lossless compression could be applied to the original URL to come up with a new one with a form like short://compressed_data_here. Granted, you wouldn't end up with 2 character URLs. On the other hand, with a standardized algorithm there wouldn't be a need for a backend database, either, since the client could expand the URL before opening it.

John Fitzsimmons · 2 years ago

Links and linking could be the most fundamental building blocks upon which the web is build. So while I like and use URL shorteners I think there are some bigger underlying issues than the centralization problem. For example, the problem no one is talking about is that URL redirects screw up search engine algorithms (because redirects other than 301's don't pass link popularity). They also provide opportunities for spammers to forward people to undesired locations. These are both problems that will become major issues if tinyURLs become "the norm".

What is a URL? · 2 years ago

There is no need to shorten urls. They should be descriptive, not short.

Adrian Buerki · 2 years ago

If you like TinyURL, you might also want to check out http://traceurl.com

TraceURL shortens any URL plus it tracks traffic to the page through the TraceURL shortened web site address, showing where the traffic originated. Count accesses and have the origin of the visitor displayed on a Google Map.

Singapore SEO · 2 years ago

I've been using http://www.tiny9.com to hide my affiliate ID in links because it has a clean design and does its job as promised.

Andrew Mager · 2 years ago

I love jtty.com

Luke (sexyer1) · 2 years ago

Jtty.com

Currently says: "RSA and Visa have asked that this site be shut down. Until I have resolved that issue we will no longer be in service"