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Comment by jpablo | Hacker News Reader

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.

We don't need them. Companies that create the shorteners need them to collect information about who clicks on your links. That, and there's a service out there that limits updates to 140 characters.

We do need them. While twitter pretty much spawned the whole ecosystem, there still is a very important and functional use for URL shorteners.

The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone. With so many email clients out there, it is a crap shoot to send a link. Personally and professionally bit.ly has really helped out in those cases.

With that in mind, I wonder what impact this announcement has on bit.ly and the other players. Does google provide analytics on their shortened links? What is the value be between the different shorteners now that Google has an offering.

The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone.

Last I tried, I could send an email formatted in HTML, where:

  <a href="http://my.crazy.long.url.gz">See this</a>

didn't take that much space, and could be read by any half-decent email client. Even alpine can do it.

Yes. I guess communicating URL orally or on paper (where people have to type them in to use them, or you may even have to write them by hand) is the only real use case for URL shorteners.

Click on the link up top, and staring at you in the face we have this text:

All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone.

Even before twitter, url shorteners were useful in many places. For example, a Google Maps link would be a good candidate for url shortening. When used in emails/usenet/IM windows, long urls often get mangled.

I had the same question. Until last week when I sent out a link to a google spreadsheet, and my awesome </sarcasm> Navy Marine Corps Intranet Windows XP/Outlook 2007/Exchange system broke the link across two lines (but only after it was sent), and then every single recipient (about 100 physicians) said they couldn't see the document. I now use tinyurl.

Yeah, sending emails with absurdly-long links is just about the only use case I've found for URL shorteners. I find it particularly useful for links to Google Maps locations or direction sets.

Why didn't you use a proper link in an HTML email?

Many people still prefer plain text email. I certainly do.

I prefer text email in theory. It's cleaner, simpler. Text for messages, that's how the web was meant to work, right?

I also cringe when I purple text in Comic Sans, as well as other unmentionables.

Yet, when I want to emphasize something, I hate using asterisks. It's not semantically correct, and it looks ugly. And how do you differentiate between underline and italics?

For this reason I support HTML email.

Using asterisk for italics and underlines (_) for underlines is an age-old convention that predates the web and HTML email by years.

I much prefer plaintext only mails. Not only are they readable on any device, I also don't have to be afraid of getting my machine infected by who-knows-what.

plaintext e-mail supports format=flowed (RFC3676) which allows lines to be arbitrarily long.

The thing is, it feels like even in those cases, the service should be shortening its own URLs.

> Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn’t go away

Isn't that what this post is about?

Mindless copy & paste for the win!

That's just NMCI's way of showing you love.

The QR code capacity is pretty flippin sweet. That's worth using all on its own.

If you just need a QR code just generate it directly and skip the shortener using e.g. http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

You can also generate QR codes using the Google Charts API.

When generating a QR code, it's important to keep the URL short, as the size of the QR is proportional to the length of the URL.

goo.gl generates them using the charts API.

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 links when sent to you from friends or relatives? (And, no, I don't mean short URLs from your aunt that sends you all the "funny You Tube" videos.)

[1] http://metamark.net/ (or http://xrl.us for the short link)

> 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:

  <http://news.ycombinator.com/>

That convention drives me batty. So much time wasted when trying to copy-and-paste those URLs.

That "convention" is one of the only standards-compliant ways to delimit URLs. Fix your copy-and-paste mechanism.

What standard says <http://news.ycombinator.com/>? The appendix of http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt says <URL:http://news.ycombinator.com/>.

Read closer.

"The characters '<' and '>' are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text".

The RFC itself uses "<URL:...>" because it already uses "<...>" for BNF non-terminals, which are much more common than URLs in the RFC.

Enjoy your undeserved upvote :)

I'm with Jeff Atwood [1] on this one; we don't.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/url-shorteners-dest...

Why is that? I'm assuming it's because when you see a link you check the URL to make sure you trust the location it's about to send you to. But surely this get's unscalable pretty quickly. Does it not?

The URL check is not against a whitelist. My head parses the URL using poorly defined heuristics to decide if it looks safe or not. I rarely get it wrong.

I recently hopped on the custom shortened bandwagon for our twitter accounts. mostly for branding purposes.

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.

Of course I'm kind of daydreaming, but it would be possible to see some stats before clicking a short link.

With the proper plugin or javascript, you could see the real link and the public stats hovering over the link (in a tooltip or whatever).

Not sure about we, but Google needs a shortener, because it's a great source of a web activity information. Compliments the data they collect through urchin.js and the ad network. Makes them track and profile you better.

1. Twitter. (Obviously) 2. Print magazine. (There was no possibly way to link to pages with long urls in print, now its bit.ly/fgyr ) 3. Billboards (Eg. Find us on twittter, facebook, blah on witter with bit.ly/grwt )

In magazines and on billboards I see links ${company_name}.com/${campaign_name}, which I think makes more sense — it's more memorable than random shortlink characters.

Judging only from how obsessively I check the bit.ly click-through stats on things I tweet, I think we'd probably be better off without them.

If the entire web were RESTful, we probably wouldn't; however, the web is full of broken applications that embed lengthy get request parameters into URLs. I'm not saying that get params are bad, just that it reaches a level of absurdity very quickly.

Twitter

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.

Google Maps uses it. Thank goodness.

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