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.