91–100 of 126 posts
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.
macrumo.rs toucharca.de
even if people don't click through, they see the names. and I'm not too worried about long term stability of the links, since they are only sent out through twitter, which tends to be a rather transient medium anyway.
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.
[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.] Does anyone know how these work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs. Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten the same input URL, y…
> Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? Let's do the math. If we assume that a service only uses a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as characters for the shortened URL, we have a set of 62 characters. /x -> 62 /xx -> 62^2 = 3,844 /xxx -> 62^3 = 238,328 /xxxx -> 62^4 = 14,776,336 /xxxxx -> 62^5 = 916,132,832 /xxxxxx -> 62^6 = 56,800,235,584 In the worst case scenario, the URL shortene…
Perhaps they have done some testing.
Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url? http://goo.gl/fBUb --> http://goo.gl/Bkmv --> http://news.ycombinator.com They don't want to allow this, do they?
http://goo.gl/87bM --> http://goo.gl/4P9R
http://goo.gl/4P9R --> http://goo.gl/7W5A
http://goo.gl/7W5A --> http://goo.gl/Wcsa
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At least the unshortened links have a chance of being scraped by things like archive.org; I wonder if it scrapes anything meaningful from the popular URL shorteners.
Actually, scraping only links from shorteners would be a a good strategy form preserving what is worth preserving.
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I don't know about need, but I often use them for emails. I prefer a plain text email program (so no HTML mail to hide the link), and it's been my experience that many receiving email clients break overly long URLs. So I use Metamark[1], which I have a reasonable trust won't disappear in a week or a month. I understand that you might not like short URLs in the wild (so to speak), but do you really not follow short li…
> it's been my experience that many receiving email clients break overly long URLs I always use the "embed in angle brackets" trick for that--although I don't know how all mail readers render it:
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Matt Cutts explains: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/goo-gl-url-shortener/ Q: Why are you doing this? A: Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn’t go away. We also wanted a shortener that we knew would do things the right way (e.g. 301/permanent redirects), and that would be fast, stable, and secure.
I think this is some indication of a continued push toward a social network/layer of some kind. Maybe just for Buzz but I think this is something more.
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> it's been my experience that many receiving email clients break overly long URLs I always use the "embed in angle brackets" trick for that--although I don't know how all mail readers render it:
That convention drives me batty. So much time wasted when trying to copy-and-paste those URLs.