Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002 | Hacker News Reader

Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002

codinghorror.com

76 pointszcrar7057 comments

Good point in this article. It also made me realize how grateful I am that MOST users on Twitter don't stoop so low as to use text messaging shorthand. I guess it is probably a matter of time until that becomes acceptable, but I am very happy we aren't there yet.

I prefer these instead: http://freakinghugeurl.com/

As a software developer, you'll be fortunate to build one project that achieves critical mass in your entire life. And even then, only if you are a very, very lucky programmer: in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea, working with the right people. Most of us never get there. I don't think I will.

...which is overmodest: StackOverflow already has critical mass.

I think his modesty is well placed. SO has critcal mass within the technical community, but not with the average user

I think thats the most it can ever really hope for without alienating it's users.

It can't be too far off. Anecdote: In the last three weeks, I've hit a Stack Overflow site in a normal Google query three times, and an ExpertSexChange query once. Out of curiousity, I clicked the SexChange link for completeness, and the score is, StackOverflow 3, ExpertSexChange 0. (Yes, I know about scrolling to the bottom. No answers, just fumbling around and questions.)

Granted, I was searching for Erlang and Perl stuff, but that's still a change vs. two months ago. Average users, which I will define as "Googlers", will probably get there soon.

(I'm assuming you're not talking about "my grandmother", who will never know what Stack Overflow is. But that would be a very silly standard to apply, so I'm assuming that's not what you're getting at.)

No, I think by critical mass he means your Aunt Minnie knows about it and asked if you are using Twitter at the last family gathering. Aunt Minnie will never know about StackOverflow.

> Still, I'm a little perplexed as to the media's near-obsession with the service

News is all about status updates. They've discovered that polling really sucks.

I don't get why there isn't a twitter feature that allows you to use something like bbcode tags to insert a url and only leave the link name in the message.

I think the reason is SMS compatibility.

This actually makes zero sense if you think about it. If the client is receiving messages via SMS, then strip the HTML. If it's a browser or API client, show a richer version.

No reason the lowest common denominator must dominate.

In most messages, the links are as important as the message itself. If you're going to selectively remove links based on how the client sees the message, then you're essentially changing the message itself based on how the client receives it. Which is wrong.

If I'm on a phone where the BEST POSSIBLE UI is recieving the messages via SMS, then what is the point of a link?

The person sending the message doesn't know you're using sms. If I post a link saying

    Look at these cats. Teh Lol! http://bit.ly/zzu3

then that message is meaningless without the url right? (in as much as it had any meaning at all)

I guess what joshu was trying to say, is if you're receiving SMS, then a url with that is useless. You can't look it up on your phone, and if you can, then use twitter on your web browser instead of SMS. Even including the URL would mean you'll have to wait til you get a computer, at which point you could just visit twitter anyway.

Restricting most users, because a tiny minority have old crappy phones doesn't seem to make sense to me.

They really feel at home within this constraint. It's very important to them that it be compatible with the 160-char SMS limit because they feel Twitter is at its heart an SMS publishing system that has grown to have other uses.

They may feel that, but they never really got that right in the first place. Twitter has a 140 character limit. SMS has a 140 byte limit. There's a 7-bit GSM character encoding which gives you the 160 characters, but that only covers basic English, select bits of other Western European langauges, and some currency symbols. So beyond those characters, you have to go down to 140 characters, and if you're in non-Latin land (like Chinese or Arabic), you have to use UCS-2, which only gives you 70 characters.

The simple Twitter 140 limit doesn't map to that at all, and coupled with the fact that Twitter SMS is disabled in a good chunk of countries, it seems silly to think of it as an SMS publishing system.

I believe the extra 20 characters is there to accommodate a username in addition to the tweet.

But things have been like this since ages in the software industry : think to the CON device under windows or termios under unix, to use examples that appeared recently on hn.

"I can't quite fit everything in there without sounding like an SMS-addled teenage girl."

What's wrong with that?

Reminds me of the story of the college green where they didn't put in any sidewalks. In order to make sure they put them where people actually needed them, they waited 6 months and them put them where the grass was worn.

These SMS-addled teenage girls have already done that for you. Don't disparage them. Take advantage of what they have taught us.

What's wrong with it is some of us still think the English language (in this case) exists for a reason and hate attempting to read vowelless nonsense created by lazy teenagers. I've seen some pretty poignant and hilarious stuff fit into 140 characters, and not one of them included "SMS-speak."

What, exactly, have they taught us? That you can effectively communicate using a bastardized version of a language? Call me old-fashioned, but I think I'll stick with the old adage and, "use my words."

Has anyone ever tried to lay out a minimal standard for English spelling and communication? That sounds like an interesting idea to me, and it's also kind of funny that almost anyone who has a violent dislike for Java's verbosity would also violently resist the suggestion to make their written communication more efficient.

There is, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform for more information.

Verbosity is not word length, and efficiency of communication is not measured in characters.

I do get that, but efficiency of _typing_ can be rather directly measured in characters.

I also get the point that part of the reason we (as a species) make language difficult is as a signaling mechanism: we can quickly identify people who aren't able to use it correctly (even if we understand precisely what they mean.)

There is significant beauty in communication through written language.

I would hate to see that destroyed.

The standardization of words permits their quick understanding.

The further fractured a language becomes, the harder it becomes to process.

i c wht ur syng.

Or "I _E_ W_A_ Y_U _R_ S_Y_N_."

But, English is redundant for a reason. Da avantige o usen more lettors es whan you not typen so great. "I c what ur syng" can't be garbled much at all before it's complete gibberish.

I had to stop at "The internet is the house that PageRank built"... gah! Talk about cart-before-horse.

http://tr.im/ has become my favorite. It's the shortest one I've seen and actually has a name that makes sense.

This is shorter: www.›.ws/ྒྷ (from http://tinyarro.ws/)

It works without the "www.".

there are other good features to some url shorteners beyond just getting your link to fit inside a tweet.

the features like metrics and click tracking behind a lot of these better offerings are quite nice and are useful way beyond status messages.

This is really very extremely selfish way to look at it. Really, what is the value of knowing that someone went to some page because they clicked on your shortened url to it. How much lazier can a content producer be, they aren't even producing content.

It's so short term focused it makes me want to puke my guts out. People with no vision create products for people with no vision and then people with vision get harmed by it. The future of the internet is getting harmed by it.

URL Shorteners should be outlawed for the sake of humanity.

Short urls = short focus, while the Internet = vision

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Shortened urls reduce future generations' ability to find information. Information and access to it will simply Vaporize!

the value is mostly found in marketing activities. to know where traffic is coming from allows you to get a better idea of where to focus and what provides best results.

i'm curious to know why you think that shortened urls will reduce future generations' ability to find information. especially since, for the most part, their usage is restricted to the social web.

"Wow, @fermat says he's proved something amazing! Damn, it's too short to fit in 140 characters. Oh wait... there's this bit.ly link... oh yeah, bit.ly went out of business and took their URL map with them."

It's a bit hyperbolic but that's the basic problem, I think.

That nails it right there, noodle. In large systems, the more weak points in the system, the more likely the system as a whole is to fail.

you could say that about almost anything online, though. whoops, wikipedia went out of business and now we've lost a lot of information. oh darn, wordpress went down for good and took all its hosted blogs and the infinite wisdom found within their content.

that is an issue with the internet at large, not just with url shorteners. in addition, the only externally meaningful thing that would be lost is the bitly connection on twitter that connects that tweet to the content. whatever brilliance he linked to would still exist outside that scope and be accessible. unless his bitly link was to bitly itself.

Except arbitrary URL shortening services are far more likely to shutdown than Wikipedia, Google, or Twitter itself. It's another level of indirection through another party which provides a service in a fast-changing, simple market.

Are all the URLs in your tweets going to be broken in 2 years? More likely than a Wikipedia or Google URL.

so are the twitter image hosts. or arbitrary S3 file hosts. or a wordpress mu blog network. or any number of other smaller alternatives for services that we deem useful.

i suppose the root of my problem with this line of thought is that it basically is saying that if you want to start a value-added service, go big or go home. no room for little guys, because if you fail you might somehow be destroying some of the fabric of the web.

i find this disagreeable. seems not very hacker-like.

It's questionable how valuable those metrics are, considering that a number of Twitter clients follow the shortened links to get the real URLs for their users, which means a hit doesn't necessarily translate into a view.

And don't forget that you have to know the location of an url to access its content.

I was just using tr.im metrics today. I wanted to see what kind of other services my users might want to use, so I created a shuffled list of links to services that don't exist yet, and then observed through tr.im metrics which one got clicked the most.

Bit.ly alone doesn't compensate for all the other pointless link shorteners out there.

just because there exist bad implementations of an idea doesn't necessarily mean the concept itself is bad.

The HTTP Referer header suffices for all the uses you just described.

And now short urls with a twist... ahh, so cute :) - http://www.socuteurl.com/

It's cool what Twitter has done in the search results: allowing any shortened URL to be expanded http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shortener. I await a browser plugin (or site widget) that will implement that same functionality into pages beyond search.twitter.com, maybe placing a dot next to each shortened URL for clicking.

I think about short urls and twitter this way:

Twitter is supposed to be real time so in reality the url only needs to last say a few weeks to really be viable even for search so if there is a pollution of some dead links over time, who cares its not like it is anything new and you should be able to google it by then.

<=3 letter domains -> one word domains -> SEO domains -> tiny domains.

Many non-geeks don't understand the whole URL thing in the first place. If you really want to save it, than educate the masses.

What I can't understand is why Twitter itself hasn't implemented this functionality. They could just have an "add link" button which exposed a text field for a URL, which is then added to the message. They could then charge for metrics on the clicks. Why encourage the use of a middleman?

They could build it such that they could at least keep the proper href, maybe rely on a script or device API to count clicks. Best of both worlds.

I'm still waiting for the obligatory "Jeff Atwood: Destroying the Web since 2002" comment

1) It's twitters fault

2) It's dangerous

3) Some irony... http://bit.ly/13nYfY

thanks for the waste of time...

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