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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

One of the main reasons I used short URLs before was twitter, but they shorten* all of them for you now.

*Unless the original URL is less than 22 characters, in which case they conveniently _lengthen_ it for you. Which includes many of the unshortened links I post. I even recently set up my blog so posts have a ~9 character permalink. So twitter would award me with about a dozen bonus characters.

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I especially hate that behavior as occasionally I'm talking about a domain name (maybe one that is having a DNS issue), not a URL, and Teitter insists on making it a lengthened URL. I've seriously taken to putting zero-width space characters before the .com to break its detection.

What do people use short URLs for nowadays? I used to run one that was "dynamnic" in the sense that you had a number of services that it could resolve and specific data you would send the services. But it never gained traction.

/g/search+query /bing/search+query /amazon/product+search /g.images/image+search etc.

I guess that's what I'm asking. The only thing I know it's really useful for is making small QR codes. Of course, a lot of people would disagree about the utility: http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/

A coffee shop in my city uses Stampt[0], so I see someone scanning a qr code nearly every day. Still, that tumblr is pretty dang accurate.

[0]: http://mobivity.com/stampt/

I use them when sending URLs through text messages.

one major use-case is tracking. The short-url goes to a redirector where the visit gets tracked. That's the most annoying part of short URLs.

I use them when sharing links to things that have seriously long URLs. For example, a link to Google Maps looks like this: https://www.google.com.ar/maps/preview#!q=Great+Pyramid+of+G... (291 characters long).

And other people use services like goo.gl to get analytics on links.

I mean, you mentioned Google, so yes, expect 200-300+ character links for the most simple of urls, with about fourteen layers of different metrics baked in.

Nothing worse than trying to get a link from Google search results.

Twitter explains their use of t.co on the root of the domain:

http://t.co/

Their explanation is a lie. They do it for tracking purposes.

as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets

Doesn't that mean tracking?

Short URLs are still useful for sharing links in email (to avoid email encoding or line wrap problems) or verbally to other humans.

I use http://shoutkey.com/ all the time for conveniently moving URLs between computers, or communicating them to others.

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