
Are URL Shorteners A Necessary Evil, Or Just Evil? - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil/
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pg
I don't think they're always evil. Tinyurl started before Twitter, apparently
mostly as a public service.

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chaosmachine
Hyperlinking words rather than including actual URLs seems like the simple
solution. Every time someone pastes a URL into Twitter, it should be replaced
with an <a> tag and the word "link". 4 letters, and no 3rd party redirect
required.

URL shorteners are great for newspapers printing links on paper, but on the
internet, we've had this long URL problem solved since HTML 1.0.

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pclark
It isn't as easy as encapsulating text in HTML. How would you deal with SMS?
etc, etc.

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vaksel
maybe cell phone carriers could enter the 2009 and offer people linking in
texts. How hard could it be

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pclark
so we've gone from changing twitter messages to changing SMS :)

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ALee
It would seem that if the shortened URL is known as a shortened URL, then it's
just a mask for the primary URL.

In terms of the link structure of the net, it would seem that crawlers just
need to know that tinyurl is a mask.

The bigger problem is the iframe for Digg and Facebook. The NYTimes used to
actually bust out of that stuff when we created it back in our previous
startup so that you couldn't run an ad alongside the publisher.

