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Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

t37.net

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Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#81

Post by dfc »

robert_tweed wrote: post #33
saurik wrote: post #3

> 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 t…

What is the ironic reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#82

Post by npsimons »

FroshKiller wrote: post #40
elinchrome wrote: post #36

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.

Middle-click much?

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#83

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

nicky0 wrote: post #30

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.

There's no real need for an API. Just do an HTTP HEAD request until you stop getting redirects (watch out for loops).

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#84

Post by [deleted] »

dfc wrote: post #81
robert_tweed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

What is the ironic reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?

[deleted]

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#85

Post by notatoad »

chrisBob wrote: post #56

Long URLs hurt the user experience and destroy the Web. If I want to send you a link to a washingtonpost.com article the link looks like: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-the-root... The same url could just as easily be user readable, and something that I could tell me office-mate verbally from 10 feet away. Most people just expect bad URLs now and have given up trying to remember the name of the p…

user readable and user typeable aren't the same thing. your WaPo url is perfectly readable - it includes the author, the source, the name of the article, and the date. if you click on it, it takes you where you want to go. if you see it in a context where you don't want to click on it but want to read the article later, you can still find the article because it gave you all the information you need to google for it. if for some reason the link breaks, you can use the information in the link to find an alternate source for the article.

apple.com/ipad is a good URL because it describes the destination. so is nbc.com/parks. but there is a practical limitation to that sort of url scheme - you only get a couple hundred pages max before you exhaust your namespace. you couldn't use a URL like that for every single article a newspaper writes without an absurd number of collisions. so you have to start using unique IDs. and if you only use the ID, you lose the memorable/describable aspect.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#86

Post by heinrich5991 »

dfc wrote: post #81
robert_tweed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

What is the ironic reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?

That makeashorterlink is unneccessarily long I guess.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#87

Post by hakcermani »

Link shortners are useful. There is possibly one other simple way to avoid the latency. t.co can resolve the link all the way to the end at the time a tweet is posted (ie run through 1-5). The latency hit is taken once and and not on every access to the shortened link.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#88

Post by darkhorn »

gioele wrote: post #27
darkhorn wrote: post #24

I have been in https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE... and http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%8F also I should note that I am https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D1%86%D0%B8...

Did you enjoy your stay in http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя ? IRI FTW.

Yes, it had a pool with naked people. http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Банкя

Edit: Oh, it needs some editing in the URL and done, cool.

Re: Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web

#89

Post by elinchrome »

rikkus wrote: post #78
elinchrome wrote: post #36

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.

Copy and paste didn't work too well on serial terminals. How far back was this 'dawn of time'?

Mid nineties.
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