

Ask HN: Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back) - thorax
http://➡.ws/

======
thorax
Just a fun shrinker we cooked-up. It will be a very long time before these
urls get very long.

For example, Hacker News is:

<http://➡.ws/퐐>

They won't work in IE6, but that's just the way it goes. Should work great on
Twitter, hopefully.

~~~
pclark
bookmarklet!

~~~
thorax
I added a basic one to the main page. Thanks for the feedback.

------
ivey
I love it! I snagged <http://➡.ws/♥> ... much fun to be had, here. Great job!

~~~
ivankirigin
That's pretty awesome. but...

I'm pretty sure services like Twitter count bytes, not characters. So unicode
will not give you much by ways of savings characters.

Also, analytics make the shorteners these days, not length. They're all pretty
much short enough, no?

~~~
thorax
Thanks for the feedback!

Sorry for the accidental downvote-- I have a reflex of downvoting people who
reply to the wrong comment and I forgot this was my own thread. Sorry. :(

Twitter is doing a character count and doesn't care about bytes-- if it did,
it means that tweeting in non-ASCII languages only gets half the characters.
That's not exactly fair.

If people like the service, we'll be adding metrics and even allow people to
search for tinyarrows that were associated with a particular domain.

It's more of something fun-- we're not trying to change the world or anything.
We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with
people.

~~~
ivankirigin
I'd heard otherwise about the byte count, but I don't have any authoritative
knowledge on the matter

    
    
      We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.

Awesome. There should be more tiny projects. I recall comments on
<http://tweetbysnailmail.com> saying "this startup will fail". They obviously
miss the point :)

~~~
nebula
The fun part aside, are there any real use cases for tweetbymail?

At the peak of .Com days, there was a startup that promised to bridge e-mail
and snail mail: one can use their service to email people who don't have an
email account or connectivity, and it would be delivered through snail mail.

------
trjordan
Bookmarklet for it. It just displays the link (no copy to the clipboard like
tinyurl, but I don't actually know javascript.), but it's better than nothing,
I guess...

javascript:void(location.href='[http://tinyarro.ws/api-
create.php?url='+encodeURIComponent(l...](http://tinyarro.ws/api-
create.php?url='+encodeURIComponent\(location.href\)))

Also, is there a better way to display this in the comments?

~~~
thorax
I'm working on the API for a moment-- someone else reported a bug. I'll
edit/respond when we get it sorted.

~~~
thorax
Should be working fine, and I added a basic bookmarklet to the main page.
Thanks!

------
brfox
I really dislike these abbreviated URL services. I prefer a moderately sized
and human readable one. I always type URLs into my address bar, also.

~~~
jasonkester
I'm with you. Recently I've seen people Twittering about Twiddla with
tinyurl'd links that are actually longer than the domain name. It's just
silly.

I think that SEO is really making things worse for URLs. Remember 4 years ago,
when "The URL was the New Command Line"? And it was considered a feature that
you could look at a URL like <http://site.com/user/3916> and hack it to get
similar pages for other users? Can't do that with
<http://yoursite.com/this_was_an_article_that_i_wrote>.

Seems like a step backwards.

------
tome
I made a cycle :-)

<http://➡.ws/♲♲>

------
dshah
Very creative idea.

However, I'm not convinced that mainstream users will get comfortable with it
(because it looks "different"). This, plus the fact that enough problems can
exist from creation/sharing/clicking that it's likely just not worth the
hassle.

Maybe it's just me, but lack of compatibility is a high price to pay for a
character (or two) shorter URLs.

~~~
thorax
It's more of an experiment than anything else. It helps get browsers and tools
up to standards and gives us a little fun/toy while we're at it.

And the URLs are dramatically shorter than a character or two-- for example:

<http://➡.ws/껻> (6 chars after protocol)

versus:

<http://tinyurl.com/aqehn8> (16 chars after protocol)

<http://ri.ms/9i0> (9 chars after protocol)

It only beats our own ri.ms shrinker by three characters, but that's still
something people might consider. And because it uses unicode, it will be a
very long time before it moves beyond even 2 character suffixes.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. :)

~~~
agotterer
The only problem is most people cant dictate or type the URL. Otherwise, A
link to my blog is 1 character and thats awesome!

------
ScottWhigham
FF3: Address not fount - Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws.

~~~
thorax
FF3 works great (for me) with these on Mac, Ubuntu, Windows, etc. What
platform are you using?

Based on your error message, I bet it's not FF3 but whatever showed you the
link. If I had to guess, you clicked on the link/page through a feed reader or
something?

Can you confirm whether it happens when you click directly from this page/site
on Hacker News? (which seems to be handling them great)

~~~
sundarurfriend
I tried going from this page directly, and get the same error message (that
too seemingly immediately - doesn't even seem like it tries a DNS resolution,
though I'm not sure): "Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws."

I'm using Firefox 3.0.5 on Windows XP.

FYI, the other link you gave in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498246>
too doesn't work for me: "Firefox can't find the server at
www.%e0%b2%95%e0%b2%b0%e0%b3%8d%e0%b2%a8%e0%b2%be%e0%b2%9f%e0%b2%95.com."

~~~
thorax
Thanks a lot for the response. Is the problem like what this guy had? An addon
that may have changed Firefox's default IDN resolution?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498378>

------
chanux
Found it on hacker news & created a Firefox Ubiquity command for it. Here it
is <http://➡.ws/⇷> (tinyarrows don't show up as links on twitterfox though.)

~~~
chanux
Though I do not have any problems with tiny arrows on Twitter/Firefox3 Some of
my friends complain that they see blah blah instead of the right signs. And
when clicked they get errors. Must be a problem with unicode support I guess &
it will be a major drawback for the tinyarrows :(

~~~
thorax
How are you sending the link to them? What software/tools are involved?

Some IM messangers and emails will mess IDN links up, so I'm on a crusade to
notify vendors to get things working better.

Also these don't work in IE6. Are they using that?

Can they click on a page like this? <http://ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ.com> ?

Thanks in advance!

~~~
chanux
I just twittered via twitterfox. I checked on my Twitter page & it shows up
well for me. But a friend using Fx3 on window$ just complained there are
problems viewing it. WC.

~~~
thorax
Thanks a lot for the clarification. If it's not a hassle, can you ask them how
they read Twitter? Did they visit the website or get through a different
reader?

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thomasswift
This is just awesome.

------
vasudeva
Not working for me in Chrome or Firefox. It's like a Mac-only splinter of the
Internet.

~~~
thorax
Chrome and Firefox both work for it fine. I use Windows actually.

Are you clicking them from a feed reader? Or from the Hacker News page? What
kind of error do you get?

Sometimes feed readers or the like urlencode the domain name and it confuses
IDN resolvers in browsers.

If it's not working directly from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498051>
can you tell me what version of Chrome and Firefox you're using?

Thanks in advance!

~~~
bd
It doesn't work at all for me in Firefox 3 on Windows. I get the same response
after clicking on all links (feed reader, HN frontpage, this page):

    
    
      Page Load Error
      Address Not Found
      Firefox can't find the server at www.➡.ws.
    

This is the same trouble as with Unicode snowman domain.

In one discussion here on HN I figured out it's probably because of some
security measure to prevent phishing. There are some Unicode characters that
look like normal ASCII letters (for example in Cyrillic alphabet), so if
Unicode worked in urls, you could create malicious sites that would look like
real ones:

<http://EXAMPLE-ВANK.COM> (fake)

<http://EXAMPLE-BANK.COM> (real)

~~~
thorax
What version/build of Firefox do you have? Firefox/3.0.6?

Also, check your about:config and filter by IDN, you should see a lot of
settings there. Any of them not set to default?

Especially check this one: network.enableIDN

by default it is set to True.

What other Firefox addons do you have that might be parsing URLs before you
visit them? Any?

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

~~~
bd
Firefox 3.0.6

    
    
      network.enableIDN;false (user set)
    

Addons that can modify urls:

    
    
      NoScript, AdBlock Plus
    

I guess it's probably NoScript that disabled IDN (internationalized domain
names). I don't remember doing it manually.

------
psadauskas
Doesn't seem to work in Firefox 3.0.6 on Linux, strangely enough. I get:

    
    
        Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws.

~~~
thorax
Works fine for most people on Linux, too. It's probably one of your addons or
settings tweaked from default, see this thread and let me know if that's not
the case?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498363>

------
albertcardona
If only the <http://> part was to disappear, that'd be a huge win.

For example, emails and <http://> addresses are already recognized as such in
places like the gnome terminal (which is great then for irssi IRC) or even in
this forum comments. But can't just domain.com/that/ be enough info to ne
recognized as an url?

~~~
thorax
More and more software at least recognizes the "www." prefix and turns it into
a link. That saves some keystrokes:

www.➡.ws/퐐

<http://➡.ws/퐐>

The www version actually works on Twitter, so we may make an easy API for that
one for tools to use.

