
ShoutKey - Temporary URL Shortener by jazzychad - johns
http://shoutkey.com/
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param
If the expiration is fixed to be 15 mins and this shortener is forced on all
users, that will resolve all criticisms of shortener sites - Everyone will
soon come to know how they are breaking the web, eventually forcing people to
use this in the intended use case only (i.e. shouting across the room)

Sometimes the best way to break a bad habit is to enforce it

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jazzychad
Thanks for submitting this, John, you beat me to it!

I was with some friends from Twilio at a hackathon one night back in January,
and we were all lamenting how hard it was to share a URL with other people at
the table w/o knowing everyone's email/IM/etc... and bit.ly links are
impossible to pronounce correctly. Someone came up with the idea of sharing a
plain english word as the short url key. So, 9 months later I whipped it up.
Hopefully a few people find it useful :)

EDIT: I should add that adding + to the end of the key will show you a preview
page like bitly links.

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mdonahoe
You should make it such that links with expired keys send you to a page with
an ad.

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jackowayed
Well, I think the reason that things expire is so that he can then reuse those
words (since there are only so many short words that anyone can spell), but
that is a good idea for ones that have expired but now yet been reallocated.

~~~
mdonahoe
If the key has been reallocated, it is no longer expired.

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jackowayed
The link you created is. If you create a link mapping foo -> google.com, and
then it expires and someone else wants a link to facebook.com and shoutcast
picks foo as their word, as far as you're concerned, your link is expired
because shoutcast.com/foo doesn't get you to Google anymore.

~~~
mdonahoe
Yes, from the submitter's perspective, their link has been reclaimed. From the
service's perspective, a key is either in use or not, and we agreed that keys
that aren't in active use could have ads on them.

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gregable
It would be smart if the length of the word was directly proportional to the
duration of the link. 5-minute links might be more likely to get a 5-letter
word, whereas a 24 hour link might be more likely to be a 10-12 letter word.
Otherwise, why would I not always choose to make my link persist for 24 hours?

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edanm
This is a really useful service. I can see myself using it in quite a few
situations.

A few points I'd address:

1\. Make sure all the words are really easy to spell. Someone mentioned the
word "constituent" in another comment, which is not a word most people will
know how to spell.

2\. Calling it "the temporary url shortener" doesn't really describe what it's
useful for. That's because the "temporary" is not the interesting part. I
don't have a good suggestion for you, but think about how to explain the value
this service provides in a tagline.

~~~
jazzychad
agreed. I'd like to change the tagline to reflect the "easy to share links
verbally with other people" aspect, but I can't seem to distill it down to a
few words... I'm still thinking about it.

Edit: ooh, how aobut: "Share links with a shout!" ??

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ollysb
How about, "short urls you can remember"?

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edanm
Not so great, since they expire after a few minutes. Remembering isn't that
much a part of the service.

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silvertab
I love the concept! I decided to try it and got the following "shoutkey":
<http://drp.ly/WfCx>

Would be funny to shout to my friend across the room "HEY, GO TO SHOUT KEY DOT
COM SLASH HOMOSEXUAL"! (not that it would bother me in any way haha)

Definitely an interesting idea!

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erikano
A friend of mine put together a function [1] that will let you use ShoutKey
directly from the cli:

shout () { curl -s "<http://shoutkey.com/new?url=$1> | sed -n 's/\<h1\>/\&/p'
| sed 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N;//b' ;}

[1] [http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6720/create-an-
ea...](http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6720/create-an-easy-to-
pronounce-shortened-url-from-cli)

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Vindexus
Cool stuff. How are you grabbing the words? Did you download a dictionary?

When I submitted my URL I got "constituent", which seems unnecessarily long.
You should consider having a list of short adjectives and a list of short
words, preferably with both being one syllable. Then you grab one from each
and you get short URLs that are still easy to remember like "redbear" or
"fastbulb". The best part about this idea is that it reminds me of the monster
names in Diablo 2.

~~~
jazzychad
I'm using a modified copy of the standard linux dictionary word list. I took
out some variants of words that I thought would be confusing or hard to spell.
I thought about using 'word tuples' as you describe, but I think that would be
more confusing and less useful overall. There should be enough single words to
make this work unless it gets insanely popular (knock on wood).

~~~
bnr
I find a combination of a few short and common word easier to memorize than
one uncommon one. It's even easier when it makes somewhat sense, like an
adjective and a noun.

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d_mcgraw
I really like the idea, but part of your concept concerns me. Having
pronounceable short urls is always a plus, but having them expire is sketchy
to me. It means 1 of 2 things in my mind and maybe you can put my worries to
rest. I will also preface the concerns with 'I did notice that the time is
variable and user chosen'.

1 You are going to litter the web with non-active(broken) links and that
sucks.

2 (more likely) As you reuse words in urls there will be links that will point
to things that are in no way related to the context in which they were
originally used.

~~~
PStamatiou
these shorturls are not meant for actually linking to anywhere online. just
for IRL sharing with others. hence the pronounceable aspect is a big part of
the utility.

~~~
jazzychad
Exactly. These links are not meant to be posted online or meant to last
forever. The main use-case is to share them aloud with other people in the
room (or write them on a whiteboard at a hackathon). I mention quite clearly
that the links are temporary, so people that use them otherwise are missing
the point I think.

~~~
andrewacove
It might be terrible from a usability stand point (or it might be an
improvement), but if the point is to share the link verbally and not via a
text link [or if doing so will litter the web with broken links], why support
direct links at all?

Why not just have an input box on the home page? The user puts in the english
word, and you do the redirect.

~~~
arb99
then rather than just type one url in and get redirected, they have to
remember to type in a url, then type in a word. its easier as it is.

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latentflip
A friend of mine wrote an article on his blog about generating pronounceable
hashes for just this purpose:
<http://peterbraden.co.uk/article/pronounceablehashing>

Not necessarily a better solution than this, but an interesting alternative I
thought.

~~~
camtarn
Shorl.com uses a system called 'Koremutake' which has roughly the same aim
(although unfortunately it seems to be tied to the URL shortener):
<http://shorl.com/koremutake>

I like the added feature of insertion of hyphens to break up groups of
syllables in Peter Braden's implementation.

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rodh257
great idea, I've often thought someone should make a URL shortener (or should
I say changer) for saying things out loud. I've heard a few podcasts were they
will say go to 'tinyurl.com/skf74d' (or spoken out loud 'go to tiny url dot
com slash s k f seven four d') and thought surely there is a better way. It
doesn't have to be short it just has to be easy to remember
'tinyurl.com/DogCatBear' is better than the above, even if its not related to
the subject matter, even better would be 'tinyurl.com/SiteThatHasSuchAndSuch'
or something like that.

Hadn't thought of the expiring part though thats key to make sure there isn't
wasted words I guess, nice, though for podcasts/conferences you would want it
to be measured in months rather than hours.

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abentspoon
Seeing an opportunity to play with metaphones, I generated a homophone-free
dictionary.

You're welcome to plug it in if you decide to tinker with the project any
more.

<http://qwerjk.com/unique.txt>

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markkat
This is a great idea, definitely going to use it. Yes, please cull out words
that are notoriously difficult to spell, like notoriously.

Smallish numbers might serve well too.

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mitjak
Now the hardest part to pronounce becomes "shoutkey" itself :)

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doctorosdeck
This is very similar to my own microstartup -> (shamless plug) JotOnce.com
except we're for messages instead of links.

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nirmal
Good thing ShoutKey gives you the key as opposed to you choosing it. I can
imagine someone ShoutKey squatting otherwise.

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nooneimportant
The expiring link part reminds me a lot of 3LNK.com, but the effort to make it
easy to remember is nice.

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Raphael
Are there enough words?

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idoh
More than enough as long as this doesn't get insanely popular, because the
words expire after 5 minutes.

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chops
You could also implement some kind of fake word-generation using common
syllables, or word-combining (easier). Word combining is easy enough to do and
will get you N^2 or N^3 options.

~~~
idoh
Agreed - that's the next logical step if needed. Maybe some heuristic to
combine simple words at first, like "andblue" instead of "octobervaporized".

