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Google URL shortener available to the public

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Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#41

Post by iheartmemcache »

cadr wrote: post #28
Lewisham wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like Wave didn't go away?

To be fair, Wave is still functional and Google announced intentions of releasing "Wave in a Box" (1). And they have explicitly said they'll provide a method to export existing data. Either way, their decommissioning of Wave is a lot more responsible than, say, what Xmarks is doing. I trust Google a lot more than a fly-by-night startup to gracefully shutdown their services.

(1) http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#42

Post by jpablo »

jdoliner wrote: post #32
jpablo wrote: post #9

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.

Why is that? I'm assuming it's because when you see a link you check the URL to make sure you trust the location it's about to send you to. But surely this get's unscalable pretty quickly. Does it not?

The URL check is not against a whitelist. My head parses the URL using poorly defined heuristics to decide if it looks safe or not. I rarely get it wrong.

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#44

Post by makmanalp »

niels_olson wrote: post #14
jpablo wrote: post #9

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.

The thing is, it feels like even in those cases, the service should be shortening its own URLs.

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#45

Post by [deleted] »

niels_olson wrote: post #14
jpablo wrote: post #9

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#46

Post by nikhilgk »

andymoe wrote: post #3

Nice simple public stats: http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours Not a huge fan of the flash chart though. http://goo.gl/Jvhu http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr EDIT: Better graph

That first link just gave us some analytics about the people here on HN. Offtopic: It reported Chrome on Ubuntu as Browsers: Ubuntu

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#48

Post by ciupicri »

niels_olson wrote: post #14
jpablo wrote: post #9

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.

Why didn't you use a proper link in an HTML email?

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#49

Post by jodrellblank »

jbarham wrote: post #31
DannoHung wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The QR code capacity is pretty flippin sweet. That's worth using all on its own.

If you just need a QR code just generate it directly and skip the shortener using e.g. http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ . You can also generate QR codes using the Google Charts API.

goo.gl generates them using the charts API.

Re: Google URL shortener available to the public

#50

Post by fletchowns »

jberryman wrote: post #20
fletchowns wrote: post #8

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.

I don't know about the rest of you but there are plenty of links in my bookmarks that are probably more than 10 years old that are still active.
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