Short URLs are not just for the web - they are incredibly useful for sending links via broadcast SMS.
Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#32> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible. No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type;…
In college everyone used NNTP. Well, CS students used it anyway. But the proper netiquette was to used shortened URLs when possible with the goal to reduce typing all around.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#33> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible. No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type;…
Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a common and pretty annoying problem.
IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the first to be popularised by Twitter.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#34> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible. No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type;…
Yeah. We used started using tinyurl on #haskell IRC by 2003 because long urls would break line wrapping, get mangled, not be typeable etc.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#35It is true at least for me. I never click on a shortened URL, whatever it might be...
I tend not to trust it.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#36> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible. No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type;…
Yeah. We used started using tinyurl on #haskell IRC by 2003 because long urls would break line wrapping, get mangled, not be typeable etc.
Please explain your "typeable" concern. I've been using IRC since the dawn of time and I could always copy and paste. Not to mention that links are recognized and you can click them.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#37This scripts [1] searchs for links in the user timeline and replaces shortned URLs with the original (stored in the data-expanded-url attribute). [1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/186801
Userscripts has been down for months, as far as I know.
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#38Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain first, before shortening the URL?
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#39It is true at least for me. I never click on a shortened URL, whatever it might be... I tend not to trust it.
Why do you need to trust a website before clicking the link? If your computer has some vulnerability to virus/hack just by visiting a website then you need to upgrade!
Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. We used started using tinyurl on #haskell IRC by 2003 because long urls would break line wrapping, get mangled, not be typeable etc.
Please explain your "typeable" concern. I've been using IRC since the dawn of time and I could always copy and paste. Not to mention that links are recognized and you can click them.
I'm going to hazard a guess that you're a Windows or Mac user.