
Down with URL shorteners - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Down+with+URL+shorteners
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ibagrak
I've been frustrated by short URLs in my Twitter feed too. So frustrated, in
fact, that I wrote an app to "peel" them. It's a Chrome extension that shows
you where the link is going before you click. Google App Engine fetches page
headers on your behalf and gives you back the real link.

It's called LinkPeelr, and you can check it out here:
<http://linkpeelr.appspot.com>

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sjs382
The ideal situation for URL shorteners (in my opinion) is for the short URLs
to be provided by the content publisher AND the short URLs should easily
translate to their long URLs.[1] Look at how YouTube
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC9Ss4dguu4> is shortened to
<http://youtu.be/lC9Ss4dguu4>) or Amazon ([http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-
Wireless-Reader-Wifi-Graphite/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-
Reader-Wifi-Graphite/dp/B002Y27P3M) translates to
<http://amzn.com/B002Y27P3M>) does it, for a good example.

They aren't the shortest possible URLs, but they clearly show the content
provider in the URL, which is great.

I actually created a web app and API (hosted on Google App Engine) to generate
these publisher-provided short URLs, but never published it. I'll polish it
off a bit tonight and post it here.

[1] This is my personal ideal. Being provided by the content publisher should
be enough, in my opinion.

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tptacek
Google: [url shorteners evil].

What does your article add to this discussion, Jacques? I mean, besides points
to your karma score? ;)

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jacquesm
I'm not aware of any concerted effort to get rid of url shorteners (other than
by the Libyan NIC, that is ;) ).

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tptacek
The authoritative place to start is probably 'joshu's article:

<http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html>

Yes, there is definitely a concerted effort to get rid of URL shorteners.

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jacquesm
Fancy that. Ok, so reading that I guess what it brought to the table that was
new is a way to get rid of them in an active way, rather than to wait for them
to go quietly.

It's one step away from banning *.ly as a referrer ;)

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joshu
I actually ended up banning most of the URL shortners in Delicious in like
2007ish...

(thanks for the mention, tptacek)

~~~
jacquesm
I just scanned all our text and outgoing links and it's amazing how much of
this crap has crept in over the years. Time to do some housecleaning.

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klync
I hate url shorteners too, for all the reasons the author lists and more. But
the article is wrong in stating "They serve no purpose other than to create a
short link..."

Actually, while that is their _primary_ purpose, they are very attractive to
the people who use them because they give you a click tracking on your
instance of the URL post, regardless of who owns the target website.

For me, this is actually another negative of the whole concept of URL
shorteners. But it's a _huge_ draw for the people using them.

~~~
jaspero
There has been increasing use of url shorteners by spammers. The problem is
you don't know which domain you're heading to. My mantra: treat all short urls
as spam.

Only issue is with the CMS urls. I think it should be made 'best practice'
rather than just 'SEO optimization', to use URL rewriting by CMS developers.

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jusob
That's why 301works exists (<http://www.archive.org/details/301works>).
Granted, even if one of the URL shortener part of this group goes down, it
would be a pain to get all the sort links replaced, but this would be
possible.

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DjDarkman
CMS support for short links is an interesting and more healthy idea.

