
http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener - Raphael
http://to./
======
mixmax
It's so short that hacker news doesn't even show the domain in the heading :-)

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bumblebird
The fascination with url shorteners is really worrying and useless. Can we get
past this fad?

~~~
furyg3
Indeed. They're a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

~~~
catone
I disagree with that statement. Even before the rise of microblogging, URL
shorteners were helpful in certain situations.

Which URL would you rather paste in an email for readability's sake:

[http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Oak...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Oak+Green+Way,+Tampa,+Hillsborough,+Florida+33611&daddr=Smith+Pl,+Cheyenne,+WY+82009&hl=en&geocode=FZJtqQEdxTEV-
ympXLQz69zCiDHqS10ETBtlnA%3BFZ89dAIdGE7B-SkH3oAMlztvhzEnHIxvn-l-
zg&mra=pe&mrcr=0&sll=34.526616,-93.626595&sspn=19.931717,39.331055&ie=UTF8&ll=34.560859,-93.427734&spn=19.923224,39.331055&t=h&z=5)

or

<http://tr.im/Gw8B>

In context, the recipient should have no problem anticipating the URL's end
point (i.e., you probably just wrote something like, "here are some directions
to my house:"), but using the shortened URL makes the email much more readable
and prevents any potential screwy scrolling issues that might be caused by an
ultra unwieldy URL borking their email software.

That's just one non-microblogging use case for one site that spits out very
long dynamic URLs -- there are many use cases for many sites.

TinyURL, et. al. certainly did (and continue to) solve a problem, imho. And
they've become even more useful for microblogging sites like Twitter, on which
character limit constraints (which essentially defines that type of service)
require that URLs be shortened.

[EDIT: I know HN auto truncated that Google Maps URL, but it is a 355
characters long -- and most email software (my use case) wouldn't auto
truncate the URL in the same way. So readability would be negatively affected
for the recipient by using the long URL instead of the short one.]

~~~
_dan
The former. Even though it's 355 characters, at least it tells me it's a
Google maps link. Which the shortened version doesn't.

There are _some_ situations where URL shortening is arguably useful. But
there's absolutely no reason why "microblogging" should be one of them.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Spoken like a person without a Twitter account.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Twitter should solve this problem, they should stick links separately to the
140 characters. Like they don't force you to encode the picture of the person
in the 140 characters.

For SMS, well if the link goes beyond 140, send it in a separate SMS? Should
SMS messaging compatibility for Twitter break the whole paradigm of
transparency of addressing on the web?

Time to move on and create solutions looking forward, not backward.

~~~
Pistos2
FriendFeed FTW. You can attach photos [separately], and each FriendFeed post
can have a comment thread.

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fix3r
Have they just broken every single url regex out there?

~~~
jfr
URL regexes which were already broken from the beginning...

~~~
wmf
Indeed. DNS names without dots have been used for decades in intranets.

~~~
rythie
However what it resolves to depends on you search domain. If I shared
<http://www> on twitter everyone would most likely see a different site.
People should really be using <http://to>. to avoid conflicts with internal
servers called 'to'

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amackera
The entire point of having a domain "name" is to have a human-readable
representation of an address. Take the human readable part out of the URL and
you're left with useless.

~~~
pyre
Because:

    
    
      http://milkandcookies.net/2008/07/12/?lang=en_US&cntry=US&source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3D123%26lang%3Den-US&geoloc=-45.001,-53.175
    

is pretty readable and useful!

~~~
blhack
I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point here but yes, that is pretty
readable and useful.

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markmywords
Can someone give me a quick introduction on how this was done?

~~~
drusenko
1- Periods (.) don't do anything after a domain (ie www.weebly.com.), but they
are useful for preventing the browsers from redirecting to
<http://www.to.com/>

2- The real domain we're looking at: "to" -- no "suffix" attached (TLD: top-
level _domain_ )

3- The .to registry added an A-record for the "to" domain, which resolves
correctly.

[Edit: Looks like .cm does this too:

;; ANSWER SECTION:

cm. 86400 IN A 195.24.205.60]

~~~
qeorge
.cm is owned by a spammer. Nearly anything .cm redirects to agoga.net.

~~~
tlrobinson
Kevin Ham:
[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm)

------
jcdreads
I can't believe no one here seems to be using
<http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/>

~~~
ericd
lol wow, amazing landing page text.

'THINK ABOUT IT: If your grandmother sees this link: <http://bit.ly/zPWG6>
she'll think, "Hmm, does someone want me to fly to Lithuania to get my teeth
fixed?"'

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pkrumins
I wrote a program to find the shortest URL. Enjoy!

    
    
        #!/usr/bin/perl
        #
        
        use WWW::Mechanize;
        
        die "usage: $0 <url>" unless @ARGV;
        
        $name = 'a';
        $m = WWW::Mechanize->new;
        while (1) {
            print "Trying http://to./$name\n";
            $m->post('http://to./', {
                url => $ARGV[0],
                name => $name,
                'Witz that URL!' => 'Witz that URL!'
            });
            unless ($m->content =~ /sorry/) {
                print "You got http://to./$name\n";
                exit(0);
            }
            $name++;
        }

~~~
delano
It's polite to add a short sleep between requests. Although, in perl it would
be a short select!

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rudd
Maybe it's something with my corporate routing/firewall/who knows, but I just
get an error saying my browser can't find it (no matter the browser). For that
reason I _really_ hope this doesn't catch on.

~~~
nollidge
I think my corporate proxy is blocking this as well, or perhaps our DNS
servers or something. In any case, I assume there will be a large swath of
people for whom this redirection will not work.

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joshu
This was my idea originally. I talk to the guy that runs the registrar
occasionally (I got burri.to 12 years ago...)

~~~
neilk
Thank you for this. I now have another example to use when I bitchslap people
who don't read domain name RFCs.

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tlrobinson
Sweet, I got <http://to./m/r>

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est
Tried to register <http://to./index.php>

Succeeded, but sadly <http://to./> rewrote it to <http://index.php> instead.

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pvandehaar
I'm aware that restructuring the Domain Name System is not practical at this
point but here's my idea: Domains should work hierarchically and be privately
operated. Google Search would be "<http://Google/Search/Web> ". A company
would buy "<http://Org> " and run a forwarding service so that
"<http://Org/RedCross> " forwarded to the respective site. This would allow
"<http://a/> " to be a forwarder and, best of all, for the web to be fully
recursive. Seems like the possibilities for such a system are limitless. For
example, an internet-archive would be the normal site with "archive/"
injected. There are of course many complex details and inefficiencies, but it
would greatly improve human-readablity, making things more easily-explainable.

This could partially be based on all file-extensions being in the file-data
rather than in the name and all folders having an "index" file that
represented them (which could, then, be any type of file). I'd like to have an
explanation for down-votes, please.

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thom
Chrome doesn't really like the URLs, and Twitter doesn't see them either.
Awesome, though.

~~~
cake
Funny, it's working under my current configuration with Firefox but not with
Opera and Chrome translates it in a Google search.

Not the world's best URL shortener...

~~~
thom
Yeah, Chrome does the same for me. I can click through the links just fine,
but pasting into the URL bar (which you're probably going to have to do until
the world updates its URL regexes) only gives me the option of a search,
unless the URL's in the history.

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ivankirigin
bit.ly isn't winning because of the length, but because of the reliability,
commitment to persistence, anti-spam, and analytics.

This is blindingly obvious. A few characters shorter just doesn't matter.

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synnik
My problem with shorteners really boils down to the conceivable scenario where
one of them gets hacked and sends everyone to a malicious site.

I also like to know where people are sending me, but that is a secondary
concern.

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charlesmarshall
seems they have problems if the same url is used more than once.. the
subsequent additions all break .. you can get around it by adding a query
string on to the domain your shortening like ?like=this

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chollida1
Oddly when I try to "shorten" their url <http://www.to/> it gets mapped into:
<http://www.to/jNUqgaaD8k>

:)

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gort
Seems to require a dot in the URL:

This: <http://to./z0ba1>

Not this: <http://to/z0ba1>

~~~
Raphael
Depends on your DNS. Works for some without.

~~~
ars
The dns works. But the browser doesn't. Without the trailing dot the browser
looks up the .com address.

With the dot it works, but then the browser fixes up the url, and removes the
dot - so all subsequent requests don't work.

(This is for me, using firefox on linux.)

~~~
charlesmarshall
seems safari users are struggling without the . as well .. probably a webkit
issue then

edited for spelling mistake

~~~
asmosoinio
Works fine here with Google Chrome.

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Raphael
Somehow uses IDN TLD to eschew the TLD altogether. Let the landgrab begin!

~~~
russss
No, it _is_ the TLD (for Tonga). Somehow they hawked out their TLD A-record.

(edit: turns out it's actually run by the ISP who operates the .to TLD)

~~~
charlesmarshall
yeah, got root level on the tld .. how did they manage that..

~~~
rbanffy
When it comes to national TLDs and how a company can have this level of
access... I don't want to know...

~~~
russss
Countries can, and frequently do, sell the rights to their ccTLDs to third
parties. For example, Verisign leases the rights to the .tv domain off the
Tuvalu government for $50m/year.

~~~
qeorge
Not exactly. Its $50MM over 12 years, so more like $4MM/year.

I remember when that deal was announced, during the first bubble. Everyone
thought it was foolish, now it seems genius.

~~~
eru
For which side?

~~~
qeorge
Getting access to sell all .tvs for $4MM/year is a steal, IMHO.

Not to mention the manner in which they sold them is unique. With most TLDs,
all domains cost the same price, and its first come, first served. With .tv,
the domains were priced according to their value, with many costing $25,000 or
more per year. So for instance I have no idea what mlb.tv cost Major League
Baseball, but it was a lot more than $49/year.

Now that .tv seems to have hit its tipping point, $50 million over 12 years is
a bargain.

~~~
russss
It was a pretty shrewd move for Tuvalu too - $4m/year is about 30% of their
GDP.

~~~
qeorge
That's a really good point. And the government of Tuvalu hasa 20% stake in the
company which actually owns the contract (Verisign owns the rest).

Very well structured deal for both sides.

------
poli
Hmm... <http://to./> was translated as <http://to./mt8hm> ! That's longer than
the original...

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shuri
<http://to./loop0>

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prodigal_erik
Someday one of these guys is going to switch back to using ftp://. Sure,
they'd have to proxy or cache everything (no redirect responses), but hey,
it's shorter.

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dasil003
Holy cow, this makes bit.ly look like long-domain-name-i-spent-10-dollars-on-
just-to-put-one-snarky-word-in-96-point-helvetica.com

~~~
Morieris
Wondering how many people tried going to long-domain-name-i-spent-10-dollars-
on-just-to-put-one-snarky-word-in-96-point-helvetica.com

like me...

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0-0
Looks like they put up a secret password now.

~~~
ptarjan
Anyone brute forced it yet?

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mauriez
thats old news. Dot TK had that for ages. go to <http://tweak.tk/> and read
the technical part.

They do it better though <http://tk./abcde> is <http://abcde.tk> which is even
on character shorter ;)

~~~
mauriez
btw: <http://tk./> works as well ;)

~~~
rajusykam
can you please tell me the actual domain name ? I am dieing for last 24 hrs.

~~~
mauriez
um.. <http://tk./> ? or <http://dot.tk/> ?

~~~
rajusykam
I want to know the real complete domain name of <http://to./> and
<http://tk./> I read all conversation. but didnt get. any help will be greatly
appreciated,

~~~
mauriez
<http://tk./> is the full domain name. Its just an A record on the TLD.
<http://tk./> is also available through <http://dot.tk/>.

I hope this helps you :)

~~~
rajusykam
ok, Thanks.

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CGamesPlay
I think users of Squid get sent to <http://www.to/> ...

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dangrover
Darn. <http://to/life> was taken. Oh well. L'chai-im!

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genieyclo
Registrar: <http://www.tonic.to/>

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1981
Check <http://w.ai>

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Confusion
Just what the world needs, YAUS

~~~
jsean
I smell irony.

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charlesmarshall
aww.. they've now added password protection. existing ones still work though

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rajusykam
can you please tell me the actual domain name ? I am dieing for last 24 hrs.

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fexl
It doesn't work with https.

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rajusykam
can someone tell me the real domain name of <http://to./> ?

