The Shortest URLs | Hacker News Reader

The Shortest URLs

tinyarrows.com

12 pointsssclafani14 comments

If you actually use the short url you are presented with a interstitial page for 10 seconds and prompted to sign up. Sorry, but that's kind of lame when compared to bit.ly and the like. (My example: http://➡.ws/shopobot)

I think the "interstitial" is just a courtesy to the user to preview the URL. There is a link on that page that offers to "never show previews." Seems to work, but of course it probably must be cookie based and be selected again if the cookie is not available.

I didn't understand this UI at first. URL shorteners are very common and they always have the same UI: Enter long URL, get short URL. This UI has an extra step that is small and somewhat hidden, so I kept missing it and wondering why nothing was happening.

Once I get past that, how am I supposed to find a unique URL? All obvious combinations have already been taken. It seems like it would be better to generate a short URL based on words in the destination page's title or something. That way the server can take responsibility for generating something unique, short, and memorable.

Finally, it seems disingenuous to market this as "shortest URLs on earth". Only until all the short ones that are easy to guess get taken. If you want to guarantee that users get the shortest URLs possible, it would be better to generate them - that way you can use all possible strings.

Other (mostly terrible) ideas for guaranteeing "shortest URLs on Earth":

* Buy lots of short domains, so that you can use the short combinations on all of them.

* Expire the short URLs. Charge extra for permanent ones. The expired ones can be reused.

* Make the short URLs language-specific and vary depending on the request language.

>Expire the short URLs.

If you do so, you break the implied permanence of URL's. Users (who you give the resulting short URL's to) would be very confused when they get directed to a totally different site.

Though... I admit that we often use URL shorteners as a temporary device, and do not actually need to keep them beyond a few minutes or hours. I suppose it would be better to use long/descriptive URL's for the more permanent links, but then we would not need this service.

Totally agree, hence the "mostly terrible". I was just brainstorming about how to achieve the guarantee "shortest URLs on Earth" if that was one's goal.

If you empty the input for the URL path, it will generate a URL for you with a unicode character(s).

This thread: http://➡.ws/ㅅ퍥

Meta: http://➡.ws/testing12

I think the novelty factor is great.

The way I see it, this isn't necessarily a tool to generate the shortest URLs by character count ... it's more a way of demonstrating the sorts of characters that are valid in domain names, and just how short a domain name can be.

I chose ✩.ws/shaun -- and I think it looks cool!

I should mention that when I tried to sign up for an account, I got an unhelpful PHP error.

OK, so I am trying to tell someone by phone how to get to my webpage. How do I do that?

"Key in Right Arrow.ws/abc"

Yeah, that'll work.

Complimentary Unicode snowman: http://➹.ws/☃

Bug report: This service generates case insensitive URLs.

Okay, fine, but how the hell is someone supposed to TYPE this address? Better yet: >.ws/ass is being redirected to Google search by Chrome.

+1. Using Unicode in URIs is a very bad idea. It's essential that an URI can be written by hand on a napkin and entered into a computer again later, without any ambiguity.

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