I really hate link shorteners, because they inevitably die and leave a spray of broken links over the web. What’s wrong with normal URLs?
https://some.tld/obvious-tracking/some-transparent.png?someUniqueCodeI mean, on a personal level sure, but if you need to get out an SMS with a link and a coherent message, you want all the characters you can get.
I would give the marketing/sales team a way to update the letter/HEX map as a plain text file.
I think tinyurl had a similar mechanism.
Length (in many contexts). Agree or disagree, but that answers your question for the "why" from what I have seen in my experience. Marketing wants to link to something sexy like "te.st/dog" vs "news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939407". Many sites may have longer url structures (esp nested structures) for various reasons that are not easy to remember or sexy to have on an ad, so when it's short it's easy to remember, and simple to type out for the user.
People using these kind of links shorterner are people using bad tools and bad UIs. This is that usage that needs to be corrected, and not by inventing things even more stupid.
It never occured to me to type an url from a radio or TV message and I've never heard anyone spelling an url from a url shortener. All TV/radio broadcasters will rather tell you check for more information in "name of the show" on "domain of the TV/radio channel" or their social media feed. They all have a web presence anyway.
Agreed
>It never occurred to me to type an url from a radio or TV message and I've never heard anyone spelling an url from a url shortener.
It happens. How do I know? Every time I've included a url (shortened or not) in a radio/tv ad, I've gotten verified traffic.
> All TV/radio broadcasters will rather tell you check for more information in "name of the show" on "domain of the TV/radio channel" or their social media feed.
This is a best practice for sure, but we all answer to someone, and that someone might not care.
Disagree. I can't scan or type a QR code into my computer.
- BlitzMail, via email - Joplin, via desktop client - Nextcloud/Owncloud - Termux, e.g. via ssh, rsync, ...
Various messenger apps with desktop clients or web interfaces, e.g. Element (matrix.org) or Threema.
Admittedly, sending it via e-mail or something would cut out a couple of those steps (still a far cry from "just copy/paste"), and is what I do on those rare occasions I do need to take a URL from my phone to my laptop, but you know what's even easier? Just sitting down at the damn keyboard and typing in whatever.com/coolthing.
Why do I need two devices just to browse your damn website on a decent sized screen or buy your product?
- scan a qrcode with a qrcode app (I use a version from f-droid) - choose "share as text" in the app - select the Owncloud app, which asks me what name the file should have
No browser step needed on the phone. In the desktop's browser I navigate to the Owncloud, open the file just saved and click on the link. No cut/copy/paste involved.
What I really do:
- scan the qr code (or the text with an OCR app like TextFairy) - share the snippet with the Joplin app - open the Joplin desktop version and there's the link or text
Or I actually use Blitzmail (share as text from some other app, which counts as the "cut" step of cut/copy/paste), then select the email arriving on the desktop and select the link (i.e. "copy" ) and "paste" it into the browser, where the last step is usually done by the desktop which offers a "open this link" menu for links in texts.
Using the Blitzmail app serves as an easy record keeping device too, when I just send a whole text block containing a link, so I have the context at hand later, if needed.
But it's not rocket science. Why the heck my iOS camera has a built in QRcode reader, but why doesn't Firefox or my webcam app on my PC?
It's niche but I always come across it when setting up a new 2FA account and I need to save the code through the mobile app instead of my PC. Such bullshit.
Agreed that QR codes are better for mobile devices and sometimes useful on a laptop.
But also QR codes can only be scanned as long as visible.
corp.ltd/specialoffer is easy to remember and type on any device
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-tweet-a-lin...
Switched it out with a cheap commercial short URL system with its own domain, and the marketers could login anytime and make their own URLs, see all the analytics, edit the destinations, etc.
Everyone was much happier after that. It did indeed cut the wait from days to seconds, and plus they had real-time usage data after that.
The problem is the DNS system itself. It is the reason that your email address gets spammed, and the reason that you can DDOS websites, etc.
DNS is a glorified search engine, and it is only really used for root urls like mydomain.tld . It's pretty much only good in two contexts:
1) for when people dictate a specific domain name verbally to someone, and even then, spelling errors can occur.
2) advertising a URL somewhere to a landing site. But you can just use a QR code that people can scan, or a link in a webpage.
Everything else may as well be at non-human-readable domain names, in which case you can even use distributed hash tables instead of DNS. Perhaps one day browsers will allow plugins realize their own schemas, such as ipfs://hjkldfjhsdfkjgsdhfgsdf and the plugin would do the routing instead of DNS. Is that currently possible with standard browser extensions?
Instead, you could be giving out capabilities, to send you email. And if one of them was abused, you'd simply turn it off, and only accounts who used it in the past could continue to send. New ones wouldn't be.
You want it to be as short and memorable as possible for anything which has limited "screen" time. Which is basically everything, i.e. Radio broadcasts, video streams/adverts, Billboards you drive by, advertisements on websites etc.
I think the paid version let's you do custom URLs but that is just a worse version of doing it yourself since a typo can lead to a completely random website.
I work daily with short links, because we need to pass parameters in URL and, depending on the amount of parameters you use in your URL, it gets bigger quickly.
Then you have many stakeholders, with no IT background, using those links and if for some reason they use ctrl+c missing some part of that big URL, the access will be broken and then they will complain its not working.
Short links are better to avoid that problem.
If you want tracking and statistics though, it gets more complicated. The simple version can be a good way to get into web development now that I think about it. You learn about forms, GET/POST, databases, very basic SQL etc.
how it works with the domain tho? i need to buy a short domain that will concatenate with my database strings, is that correct?
My plan with Dub is to keep this running at a sustainable pace for as long as possible, and I believe it's possible for a few reasons:
- Operating costs for Dub are quite low at the moment, thanks to Edge Functions (https://vercel.com/edge) + Redis.
- I'm leaning into the custom domains & self-hosted aspect with the freemium model – where enterprises and businesses would be able to get set up with a custom domain link shortener super easily.
- Agree that individual short links are definitely not sustainable in the long run, I might set a rule where randomly-generated links > 30 days get deleted, to save it you'll either need to make an account (to prevent spam) or set up your own domain.
I've seen some random blogging software break when you embed certain kinds of links into articles, for example, ones that have query strings (?key=value), where the question mark gets interpreted as something else by the software and thus the link gets cut off and no longer works.
In cases like that, it makes sense (because you literally don't have a choice, unless you want to migrate to something else).
Also some might enjoy the consistency of short links, instead of having a URL that's really long. That is also pretty nice for putting the URL on a poster, flier, or sending it to someone.
Some also just don't care about the implications of the link going down in the future.
* Allow you to "buy" transparent clicks for your URL (e.g. 1 cent per "transparent" click)
* Implement "ad gateway" like what adf.ly does for non-transparent URLs
* Give you X small amount of "transparent" clicks for free
* Use something like IPFS or (gasp) Ethereum blockchain for storing the data... allow you to keep your URLs alive by paying for them (this last one is not that clear)
* [Don't kill me] At some point (back when it had started) I though of putting a WASM miner in a frame when visiting a page.
My main problem is that I have not been able to get a good domain name.
Nothing's wrong with normal URLs. Every post on my website can be reached by a single decimal number appended to the end of the domain.
But this requires every website on the internet to care about having URLs of reasonable length. URL shorteners allow a third party to put a bandaid over the problem.
Nothing, but how would you then track users and redirect through 3 nested services to attribute purchases? ;)
Sort of :-)
Hmm... I wonder if Google interprets and follows QR Codes?