http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
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Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#92bit.ly isn't winning because of the length, but because of the reliability, commitment to persistence, anti-spam, and analytics.
This is blindingly obvious. A few characters shorter just doesn't matter.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#93The fascination with url shorteners is really worrying and useless. Can we get past this fad?
Indeed. They're a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
a solution to a problem that doesn't exist
I do not use them, but long URLs are a pain in many contexts, and it's not always possible to [link]wrap a tag around it[/link]. Server > client communication has gotten incredibly flexible, but client > server or client > peer communication is still mostly text-driven, and many URLs are not text-friendly or human-friendly.
The widespread use of these shorteners strongly argues that they do solve a problem, just not one that matters to you as a programmer.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have their own url shortner.
Every major website should have their own URL shorter. People would be more willing and trusting to click a random link found on Twitter if it's from Gizmodo's short URL rather than bit.ly. Then again, people shouldn't click random links.
No need to build a new one every time; services like http://totally.awe.sm let you set up a URL shortener on any domain. (Disclaimer: the founder is a friend of mine)
And before you say "it's trivial, I could build that in a weekend" I suggest you try it; there is a lot of hidden complexity in something so simple, especially at any kind of scale.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
For whatever reason they actually used com.com.
Because it was the dot-com boom, and what was better than one dot-com? TWO! But yeah, they then proceeded to put everything under .com.com, so they had news.com.com, cnet.com.com etc. It was painfully stupid.
I believe the justification was so they could use unified cookies across all their properties -- they set the cookie for "com.com", and then it was available to news.com.com, search.com.com, downloads.com.com, etc., in the same way that yahoo.com cookies are available to news.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com, etc.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not exactly. Its $50MM over 12 years, so more like $4MM/year. I remember when that deal was announced, during the first bubble. Everyone thought it was foolish, now it seems genius.
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.
Now that .tv seems to have hit its tipping point, $50 million over 12 years is a bargain.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#97The entire point of having a domain "name" is to have a human-readable representation of an address. Take the human readable part out of the URL and you're left with useless.
This is why it makes more sense to run your own URL shortener, and make it discoverable using a pattern like rev:canonical:
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#98I can't believe no one here seems to be using http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. They're a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
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…
You can make it much shorter without loss, unfortunately Google Maps doesn't do it for you:
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#100Earlier 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…
FriendFeed FTW. You can attach photos [separately], and each FriendFeed post can have a comment thread.