

How URL Shorteners Should Change - bozho
http://web.bozho.net/?p=117

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Maxious
What's the difference between
<http://wshr.eu/techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook/fXd> and
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-countersues-
yahoo/...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-countersues-
yahoo/?user=fXd) ?

Reliance on a third party.

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benjoffe
When I view ~10 year old web sites and forums it's rare enough that external
links work at all, with all these link shorteners it's going to be even worse.

I imagine in the not too distant future that link shorteners will no longer be
used (for one of many reasons), if/when that day comes most link shortening
sites will have no incentive to keep their service available, and it would be
hugely tempting for them to modify existing links to display relevant targeted
ads, instead of the destination pages. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if many of
them exist purely with that intention.

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bozho
I also hate shorteners. But marketers love them, because they give them
statistics. So they will be still in use, alas. The point is to improve them a
bit.

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read_wharf
URLs should be shortened and expanded in the browser, according to an RFC
scheme. No third party and they live as long as the RFC's implementation does.

I would prefer to hover over a link and have my browser tell me where the link
goes, not relying on some third party.

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bozho
I'm 100% with you here. But it will take time for that to become common. Until
then, we can improve the existing situation a bit.

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alexkappa
So what you're basically saying is that url shorteners shouldn't shorten urls
anymore?

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kzrdude
they should simplify them, without single focus on as short as possible

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Terretta
Ticks me off every time Twitter fails to post a tweet and I realize it's
because they're _lengthening_ the j.mp URL.

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LinaLauneBaer
Why? Twitters URL shortener is also used to prevent spamming. In addition
Twitter tries to detect malicious content and warn the user about it. They
have reasons why they lengthen shortened links...

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Terretta
bit.ly (j.mp) does all those things, without having to have a longer link. It
provides fantastic analytics combined with the shortest URLs.

