Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible.

No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type; they also have tons of puncutation, and are at danger of being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and character mapping.

View on HN

Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a common and pretty annoying problem.

IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the first to be popularised by Twitter.

What is the ironic reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?

That makeashorterlink is unneccessarily long I guess.

I like my irony served with less inevitability.

Yeah. We used started using tinyurl on #haskell IRC by 2003 because long urls would break line wrapping, get mangled, not be typeable etc.

Please explain your "typeable" concern. I've been using IRC since the dawn of time and I could always copy and paste. Not to mention that links are recognized and you can click them.

I'm going to hazard a guess that you're a Windows or Mac user.

Well you can paste into irssi too.

i̶r̶s̶s̶i̶, or rather the terminal it's running in according to the person replying my comment, lets you click on links to open a browser too.

That's the terminal, not irssi.

Middle-click much?

Copy and paste didn't work too well on serial terminals. How far back was this 'dawn of time'?

Mid nineties.

Thank you for mentioning this, I'll correct the article accordingly.

[edit] Fixed

they existed way before 2002. I used to use welcome.to/ back in 1997 or 1998 to give out a shorter URL to my very long geocities one

Good ol' geocities. Now that takes me back!

While not really a URL shortener in the tinyurl sense, cjb.net offered sub-domains for URL redirection that effectively shortened long URLs (ie: mysite.cjb.net) since the late-1990s; it was a pretty popular in the gaming community.

Also, many paper magazines had similar services (often called "quicklinks" or similar) for a long time where they would just print the URL or even just the ID of the link, for easy lookup on their website.

In college everyone used NNTP. Well, CS students used it anyway. But the proper netiquette was to used shortened URLs when possible with the goal to reduce typing all around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com