

How To Make Your Own TinyURL service - moses1400
http://blog.htmlcenter.com/2007/09/make_your_own_tinyurl_service.html

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aston
For what it's worth, this is not the right way to implement such a site. The
author notes that there's a collision problem, but pretends it's not a big
deal when it actually is. What's the chaining (re-hashing) strategy, and do
you really want to pay that cost every time anyone clicks either of the
colliding links?

The better implementation is the one that seems stupid, namely start at 1 and
increment your link number every time you get a new one. Encode it in
something like base 36 (numbers plus lowercase letters), and you're basically
done. This method also guarantees that your links are no longer than they need
to be.

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raghus
It's not writing another tinyurl site that's difficult - there are a bunch of
other url shortening services out there. Part of it comes down to how long
people think you'll last and, so far, tinyurl has outlasted many startups -
they'll likely be around well after Twitter has been acquired or replaced by
some other service.

But yes, twitter can certainly roll their own.

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Tichy
Interesting question, how do they make money? I guess they gather a lot of
interesting data, because they can monitor who visits pages they don't own
(and also which pages get recommended the most, a ka generate the most URL
generation requests). Maybe they can sell that data. On the other hand,
services that have a hook into the original pages, like Google Analytics,
probably gather a lot more data than TinyURL can, so I don't see the advantage
for TinyURL?

