

URL shorteners suck - winanga
http://www.kottke.org/09/04/url-shorteners-suck

======
jgrahamc
I wonder how well a shortener that included a clue about the domain would be.
e.g. suppose that you shortened an amazon.com link to

<http://amazon.XXX.YY/ABC>

where XXX.YY is some suitable 6 letter domain name and ABC is a three letter
hash. Assuming three letters from the valid [0-9A-Za-z] you have 62^3 possible
links _per domain_. Extending to four characters you'd have 62^4 (over 14m
links _per domain_).

So an amazon.com link would drop to 25 characters. A TinyURL link is currently
25 characters (bit.ly would be 18). So this is still in the ballpark.

Of course, the results aren't consistent (e.g. a ycombinator.com link would
have 30 characters). But it would give a lot of information. Also, I think for
non-.coms you'd have to include the TLD.

An advantage of using subdomains it that on YC/Reddit/Digg these links could
easily be made to show as, for example, amazon.XXX.YY

~~~
erikwiffin
That sounds like a really good idea actually. The only problem with this is
that it would take more than the typical 10 lines of code (9 for interface) to
set up a url shortener. Currently, all you need to set up a url shortener
service is a domain name and a database.

~~~
jgrahamc
It's about 11 lines of code. All you need to do add a wildcard entry in the
DNS so that *.XXX.YY resolves to the same IP as XXX.YY, tell Apache to accept
all Hostnames for that IP address, extract the subdomain from the hostname
while extracting the hash.

I reckon I could get this up and running in about an hour if enough people
upvote this comment :-)

------
sam_in_nyc
I think it most amazing that Twitter has ubiquitized the short URL.

And, also, I agree.. URL shorteners suck. At least improve user experience by
showing the original URL in the title attribute.

~~~
moe
Ubiquitized _within twitter_.

You probably meant it that way but many people seem to forget over the hype
how small twitter still is. Only 0.4% of internet-users have an account there
and much less are actively using it.

Consequently short URLs being ubiquitous within twitter doesn't mean much in
itself.

------
stcredzero
Perhaps we need a compacted URL standard? How about something MIME encoded,
with a 5 bit prefix to handle the protocol, and Huffman coding for the rest?
Then applications like Twitter and IM/MMS clients could simply decompress the
URLs inline, and the whole thing would be transparent to the user.

------
Tichy
A bit sorry I voted this up - it doesn't add anything new to the discussion,
but it feels like making an official vote against URL shorteners. Which is of
course nonsense, this is only news.yc...

