

Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002 - zcrar70
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html

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TrevorJ
Good point in this article. It also made me realize how grateful I am that
MOST users on Twitter don't stoop so low as to use text messaging shorthand. I
guess it is probably a matter of time until that becomes acceptable, but I am
very happy we aren't there yet.

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zargon
I prefer these instead: <http://freakinghugeurl.com/>

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jcl
_As a software developer, you'll be fortunate to build one project that
achieves critical mass in your entire life. And even then, only if you are a
very, very lucky programmer: in the right place, at the right time, with the
right idea, working with the right people. Most of us never get there. I don't
think I will._

...which is overmodest: StackOverflow already has critical mass.

~~~
maukdaddy
I think his modesty is well placed. SO has critcal mass within the technical
community, but not with the _average_ user

~~~
robryan
I think thats the most it can ever really hope for without alienating it's
users.

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Herring
_> Still, I'm a little perplexed as to the media's near-obsession with the
service_

News is all about status updates. They've discovered that polling really
sucks.

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robryan
I don't get why there isn't a twitter feature that allows you to use something
like bbcode tags to insert a url and only leave the link name in the message.

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msc
I think the reason is SMS compatibility.

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axod
Restricting most users, because a tiny minority have old crappy phones doesn't
seem to make sense to me.

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thorax
They really feel at home within this constraint. It's very important to them
that it be compatible with the 160-char SMS limit because they feel Twitter is
at its heart an SMS publishing system that has grown to have other uses.

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yosh
They may feel that, but they never really got that right in the first place.
Twitter has a 140 _character_ limit. SMS has a 140 _byte_ limit. There's a
7-bit GSM character encoding which gives you the 160 characters, but that only
covers basic English, select bits of other Western European langauges, and
some currency symbols. So beyond those characters, you have to go down to 140
characters, and if you're in non-Latin land (like Chinese or Arabic), you have
to use UCS-2, which only gives you 70 characters.

The simple Twitter 140 limit doesn't map to that at all, and coupled with the
fact that Twitter SMS is disabled in a good chunk of countries, it seems silly
to think of it as an SMS publishing system.

~~~
spohlenz
I believe the extra 20 characters is there to accommodate a username in
addition to the tweet.

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edw519
"I can't quite fit everything in there without sounding like an SMS-addled
teenage girl."

What's wrong with that?

Reminds me of the story of the college green where they didn't put in any
sidewalks. In order to make sure they put them where people actually needed
them, they waited 6 months and them put them where the grass was worn.

These SMS-addled teenage girls have already done that for you. Don't disparage
them. Take advantage of what they have taught us.

~~~
tdavis
What's wrong with it is some of us still think the English language (in this
case) exists for a reason and hate attempting to read vowelless nonsense
created by lazy teenagers. I've seen some pretty poignant and hilarious stuff
fit into 140 characters, and not one of them included "SMS-speak."

What, exactly, have they taught us? That you can effectively communicate using
a bastardized version of a language? Call me old-fashioned, but I think I'll
stick with the old adage and, "use my words."

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WilliamLP
Has anyone ever tried to lay out a minimal standard for English spelling and
communication? That sounds like an interesting idea to me, and it's also kind
of funny that almost anyone who has a violent dislike for Java's verbosity
would also violently resist the suggestion to make their written communication
more efficient.

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branden
Verbosity is not word length, and efficiency of communication is not measured
in characters.

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WilliamLP
I do get that, but efficiency of _typing_ can be rather directly measured in
characters.

I also get the point that part of the reason we (as a species) make language
difficult is as a signaling mechanism: we can quickly identify people who
aren't able to use it correctly (even if we understand precisely what they
mean.)

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mooneater
I had to stop at "The internet is the house that PageRank built"... gah! Talk
about cart-before-horse.

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michaelawill
<http://tr.im/> has become my favorite. It's the shortest one I've seen and
actually has a name that makes sense.

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andreyf
This is shorter: www.›.ws/ྒྷ (from <http://tinyarro.ws/>)

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dreish
It works without the "www.".

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noodle
there are other good features to some url shorteners beyond just getting your
link to fit inside a tweet.

the features like metrics and click tracking behind a lot of these better
offerings are quite nice and are useful way beyond status messages.

~~~
pj
This is really very extremely selfish way to look at it. Really, what is the
value of knowing that someone went to some page because they clicked on _your_
shortened url to it. How much lazier can a content producer be, they aren't
even producing content.

It's so short term focused it makes me want to puke my guts out. People with
no vision create products for people with no vision and then people with
vision get _harmed_ by it. The future of the internet is getting harmed by it.

URL Shorteners should be outlawed for the sake of humanity.

Short urls = short focus, while the Internet = vision

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Shortened urls _reduce_ future
generations' ability to find information. Information and access to it will
simply Vaporize!

~~~
noodle
the value is mostly found in marketing activities. to know where traffic is
coming from allows you to get a better idea of where to focus and what
provides best results.

i'm curious to know why you think that shortened urls will reduce future
generations' ability to find information. especially since, for the most part,
their usage is restricted to the social web.

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silentOpen
"Wow, @fermat says he's proved something amazing! Damn, it's too short to fit
in 140 characters. Oh wait... there's this bit.ly link... oh yeah, bit.ly went
out of business and took their URL map with them."

It's a bit hyperbolic but that's the basic problem, I think.

~~~
noodle
you could say that about almost anything online, though. whoops, wikipedia
went out of business and now we've lost a lot of information. oh darn,
wordpress went down for good and took all its hosted blogs and the infinite
wisdom found within their content.

that is an issue with the internet at large, not just with url shorteners. in
addition, the only externally meaningful thing that would be lost is the bitly
connection on twitter that connects that tweet to the content. whatever
brilliance he linked to would still exist outside that scope and be
accessible. unless his bitly link was to bitly itself.

~~~
silentOpen
Except arbitrary URL shortening services are far more likely to shutdown than
Wikipedia, Google, or Twitter itself. It's another level of indirection
through another party which provides a service in a fast-changing, simple
market.

Are all the URLs in your tweets going to be broken in 2 years? More likely
than a Wikipedia or Google URL.

~~~
noodle
so are the twitter image hosts. or arbitrary S3 file hosts. or a wordpress mu
blog network. or any number of other smaller alternatives for services that we
deem useful.

i suppose the root of my problem with this line of thought is that it
basically is saying that if you want to start a value-added service, go big or
go home. no room for little guys, because if you fail you might somehow be
destroying some of the fabric of the web.

i find this disagreeable. seems not very hacker-like.

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philipolson
And now short urls with a twist... ahh, so cute :) \-
<http://www.socuteurl.com/>

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adrianwaj
It's cool what Twitter has done in the search results: allowing any shortened
URL to be expanded <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shortener>. I await a
browser plugin (or site widget) that will implement that same functionality
into pages beyond search.twitter.com, maybe placing a dot next to each
shortened URL for clicking.

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buugs
I think about short urls and twitter this way:

Twitter is supposed to be real time so in reality the url only needs to last
say a few weeks to really be viable even for search so if there is a pollution
of some dead links over time, who cares its not like it is anything new and
you should be able to google it by then.

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quizbiz
<=3 letter domains -> one word domains -> SEO domains -> tiny domains.

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access_denied
Many non-geeks don't understand the whole URL thing in the first place. If you
really want to save it, than educate the masses.

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sho
What I can't understand is why Twitter itself hasn't implemented this
functionality. They could just have an "add link" button which exposed a text
field for a URL, which is then added to the message. They could then charge
for metrics on the clicks. Why encourage the use of a middleman?

They could build it such that they could at least keep the proper href, maybe
rely on a script or device API to count clicks. Best of both worlds.

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kylec
I'm still waiting for the obligatory "Jeff Atwood: Destroying the Web since
2002" comment

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jmatt
1) It's twitters fault

2) It's dangerous

3) Some irony... <http://bit.ly/13nYfY>

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jpwagner
thanks for the waste of time...

