URL Shorteners – the herpes of the web | Hacker News Reader

URL Shorteners – the herpes of the web

inquisitr.com

36 pointsnreece17 comments

ContentLink ads - the chlamydia of the web

Maybe because the problem is arising people will move to short urls on their own sites so that they don't even need to be shortened for twitter and such, because honestly the problem isn't that the urls are redirecting its that the urls need to be redirected because of an unnecessary long url for clarity.

In all honesty I don't know very many people that look at the full url before they click on it; the domain name does most of the work and the description accompanying the url does the rest.

I don't click a link until I've read the comments on HN. :)

Somebody should write a wordpress plugin that offers a shortened URL along with the Google-URL (Google URLs meaning myblog.com/my-blog-article-about-whatever, shortened to myblog.com/whatever).

" Maybe because the problem is arising people will move to short urls on their own sites so that they don't even need to be shortened for twitter and such, because honestly the problem isn't that the urls are redirecting its that the urls need to be redirected because of an unnecessary long url for clarity."

And this is the part I never quite understood. Does anyone really type in the URLs? Folks click, or at best copy and paste. Did anyone here for once typed in that http://tinyurl.com/yadayada stuff?

What exact problem URL shortener addresses, aside from (maybe) miniscule adjustment of aesthetics?

Where's the herpes come in? Herpes is spread by human contact, is a very common virus (1 in 4/5 depending on who you ask) sooo where's the connection? Is it that simply there's lots of URL shorteners?

Another linkbait article title that fails to live up to it's intention.

My next article headline: Linkbait Article Titles - the Herpes of the blogosphere.

So we have a problem. What's the solution? Use something like http://www.snap.com all over the place? Seems like that being able to see where the shortURL leads is one way to counter it.

The problem isn't just the opacity, it's that url shorteners add an extra, and extremely flaky point of failure in the web request cycle.

The web is patchy enough already w/ domains expiring and sites rearranging their content (w/o a way to update 3rd party links elsewhere). Add to this another service that may or may not be around in 5 years to the opacity and you've got scads of links going dead if one service/domain goes dead.

If perhaps there was a common shared standard for how the hashes mapped to urls, that was reversible, then it'd be less of a problem, since then you just stick the hash into another service that supports minified urls, and you're fine. It'd be a good project for google :P

How about non-confusing URLs, and stop using query strings in place of URLs?

http://www.someone.tld/products/coolthing/

is better than

http://www.someone.tld/page?type=product&id=2386712&...

If you wanted to push this further, use your own permalink on your site, something like:

http://p.somesite.tld/23a44fd

It's not descriptive, but at least it gives you credit for the page.

I'd argue that the majority of people that are using URL shorteners have a more fundamental problem: They don't even realize that most of the params aren't needed.

For example, I recently looked at this King Hokum CD on Amazon (awesome artist BTW, this CD is stupid overpriced though): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012U346Y/ref=s9_sims_gw_s...

What's the relevant part?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012U346Y

But how the hell does someone know that without dicking around?!

Youtube helps users by providing a link for you to copy, sites like Amazon should do the same.

I agree, but please don't let that be the short link. The Amazon link DannoHung mentions is a bit weird, but Amazon's default links are really helpful, with the title in it. People often link to a book like this: "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Interfaces-Principles-In...; is a good book!" I find it useful that when I mouseover the link, I can see the title of the book, and then realize I either already know the book, don't like the book, or would like to read more. If the link is just <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596008031">this</a...; I have to click before knowing what exactly the book is that the person recommends.

Useful URL's are a good thing and it saddens me that the current debate does not focus on that more and that people even argue that standard url's should be short and non descriptive.

Why not offer both a long and a short URL at the same time?

Yeah, but the title part just gets ignored: http://www.amazon.com/I-Can-Basically-Put-Anything-I-Want-In...

That still won't help someone who's trying to paste it into Twitter or a Facebook status feed.

Those are problems that should be solved by Twitter and Facebook. Give people a way to put a link with shorter link text, something simple like Markdown [text](url) format.

If the message is being sent to SMS or some other constrained medium, then automatically shorten it. Chances are that link won't be distributed beyond the device it's sent to anyway.

Or a completely different take on this "issue".

http://garrettdimon.com/archives/2009/4/13/the_downside_of_p...

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