21–30 of 126 posts
Edit: Ah, its website is just new. Here the original post: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short...
There was already a Chrome extension since the beginning.
Why do we need url shorteners again ? When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero.
I had the same question. Until last week when I sent out a link to a google spreadsheet, and my awesome Navy Marine Corps Intranet Windows XP/Outlook 2007/Exchange system broke the link across two lines (but only after it was sent), and then every single recipient (about 100 physicians) said they couldn't see the document. I now use tinyurl.
[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.] Does anyone know how these work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs. Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten the same input URL, y…
Once the 4-character paths are saturated they'll probably simply move to 5-characters. With respect to goo.gl, the help page lists these features: Immutable - once created by you, no one else can change them Irrevocable - once created, they do not expire. I think that most large shorteners don't automatically expire links. It would be pretty miserable if they did.
(numbers + lowercase + upper case)^num of characters 10+26+26 = 62^4 = 14,776,336.
That's a reasonably large number (and then my friend just suggested the adding a character if they start to run out).
Thanks!
There are a couple of Greasemonkeys to lengthen shortened URLs. Hopefully they will be updated soon. http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener...
Why do we need url shorteners again ? When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero.
I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as Google Apps has become my standard for email,…
I could be very wrong, though.
Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world. I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of th…
I don't think anyone really believed that something you can hack together in twenty minutes, where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one", really counts as a "space". Anyone who invested in it deserved to get burned. bit.ly were working on partnerships with publishers as their means of getting some monetization, but that's all I've really seen. I'd prefer the Google one to t…
[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.] Does anyone know how these work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs. Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten the same input URL, y…
Let's do the math. If we assume that a service only uses a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as characters for the shortened URL, we have a set of 62 characters.
/x -> 62
/xx -> 62^2 = 3,844
/xxx -> 62^3 = 238,328
/xxxx -> 62^4 = 14,776,336
/xxxxx -> 62^5 = 916,132,832
/xxxxxx -> 62^6 = 56,800,235,584
In the worst case scenario, the URL shortener will have to use a 6 character identifier at some point, giving them a complessive coverage of almost 58 billion URLs.
The 4 characters they are currently using will only be enough for a while. They'll switch to 5 soon enough.
I wonder what the web will be like in 10 years when most of these URL shorteners don't exist anymore and we're just left with a web full of links that go nowhere. I'm sure the Google one will survive, seems like we shouldn't have to use these URL shorteners at all though.
i agree with you, but how many of those unshortened links do you think will exist 10 years from now? i think the web is like a brain in which memory is active, not static. it`s just a bit too young for that to be obvious.