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http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

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Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#111

Post by Kadin »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #75
_dan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spoken like a person without a Twitter account.

That's a stupid design decision on the part of Twitter, which the rest of the Internet is paying for.

At the very least, Twitter could only shorten URLs when messages go out via the SMS gateway, and not universally. All they'd need to do is count any valid URL as 20 characters (length of a bit.ly shortened URL) for the purpose of the limit, while preserving the actual real URL up until that limit actually mattered.

The sad and ironic part is that the 140-character limit and the URL shorteners it spawned will probably stick around, due to Twitter, far longer than Twitter-via-SMS does. I don't know many people who even use Twitter via SMS anymore; it was a cool feature initially, but it's being quickly obsoleted by smartphones that can access Twitter via much more user-friendly interfaces via TCP/IP.

"140 characters" is likely to become the "4 feet, 8-1/2 inches" of the Internet. Totally arbitrary, far from ideal, nearly impossible to change.

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#112

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jiaaro wrote: post #55
sili wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Tweeter and other places that have message length limit ignore the length of the URL in you post?

They can't do that due to text-message length restrictions

I understand, from looking at this when I first came across twitter, that there is a well established protocol for using multiple text messages to send a single message.

Couldn't they in any case have a convention of putting a hash mark (#) for the URL when texting and then sending URLs in subsequent messages, each message being serially (by time of sending) matched with a # mark?

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#113

Post by [deleted] »

Pistos2 wrote: post #101
_dan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it tells me it's a Google maps link. Which the shortened version doesn't See http://twi.bz/ . "twi.bz shortens web addresses without completely obscuring where the link ends up. By keeping part of the domain name in the twi.bz link it's possible to instantly see the site you'll end up on by clicking the link."

[deleted]

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#114

Post by jurjenh »

symptic wrote: post #86
catone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... 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 directio…

This tells me Google should consider providing shortened URLs. maps.google.com/a7sga would be great.

That could possibly be implemented as a hash of the included header/response terms.

A simple example could be http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hacker+news+site:yc... -> http://www.google.com/search?#b9fh23

One downside would be that you can't see the query parameters and values in plaintext, but a browser extender / inspector could probably do this.

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#115

Post by bkudria »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #87
andrewljohnson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like a person without a Twitter account.

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…

It's not like SMS is limited to 160 characters, anyway.

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#117

Post by Morieris »

dasil003 wrote: post #90

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

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...

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#118

Post by russss »

qeorge wrote: post #96
eru wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For which side?

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.…

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

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#119

Post by windsurfer »

thom wrote: post #69
bumblebird wrote: post #27

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

The stats that you can get out of something like bit.ly are quite useful. Or at least ego-strokingly hypnotic.

I use an extension, like many others, that automatically "follows" every url shortener url on a page. Your stats are likely skewed.

Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener

#120

Post by andrewljohnson »

gregmalcolm wrote: post #107
andrewljohnson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public, covert racism?

Huh? And for the record, chrome and ie no worky for me either. Firefox does though.

When you say no workie or no worky, what accent are you mimicking?
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