61–70 of 91 posts
Why doesn't t.co (and, in fact, any URL shortener) follow the redirect chain first, before shortening the URL?
> 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;…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pet peeve: articles that start with the word “why” where “how” is what they meant. Why link shorteners do this is a completely different question with completely different answers.
Another nit: j.mp and bit.ly are different domains for the same service. If you append a "+" to either URL you see how many times the destination has been shared, clicked, and by all shortened versions of the destination. So it's like both of those are the same link.
Final nit: The Internet was designed to survive nuclear war. The "X destroys the Web" trope is popular, but getting incredibly tired. That's not to say there aren't totally legitimate criticisms of URL shorteners - there are! - but their use clearly pre-dates Twitter and obviously has numerous legitimate use cases as lots of comments here attest to.
It definitely won't remember company.com/section/potentially_a_subsestion/page?someParamters=mayyybe if I see it somewhere. But I might remember bit.ly/CompanyCampaign.
Some might say that it's the developers/company fault, they should have made the URLs more friendly/configurable. Yeah maybe, but it's often easier just to use a shortener, let's be realistic.
I also use them when I know I will need to open some link directly (i.e. by typing in URL). For example, I prefer bit.ly/myPresentation to logging into google drive, getting 2FA text, finding the presentation...
So yeah, while they are evil in some cases, they have a bunch of genuine use cases.
Another evil that roams interwebs are "farewell" gates for outgoing links; eg dA [1]. Unlike URL shorteners which could be in rare cases useful [2] I see not a single benefit of this. [1] http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.devianta... [2] http://tinyurl.com/selfcontained-editable-datauri (yes, this one is a misuse, but whatewer)
What's bad about them? Blocks referer and warns of phishing.
2) Phishing protection: assuming such outgoing links are checked with Safe Browsing API or something similar (I doubt it), again, that's what my browser does by default. (Incidentally, sometimes I do not want my browser to do this either, so again I like to switch this off: things are a bit faster and free disk space bigger sometimes.) It might seem nice that some page makes this effort too, but again, I don't see a big deal in it.
It's even more annoying on mobile (I'm using Android). If I click an Instagram link in a tweet (since Instagram images no longer show up inline on Twitter), it loads the t.co link in my web browser, and then launches the instagram app to show me the photo. If I then press my phone's "back" button, it takes me back to my web browser, and I have to press "back" again to get back to the Twitter app. It also leaves the t…
A useful service to "unshorten" links is http://longurl.org/ Paste in a shortened link and it will tell you the original URL, listing all the intermediate steps on the way. It also has an API.