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URL shorteners still serve a purpose for sms, marketing, smart redirects, and more. One of the ways to combat some of the concern around what happens if the ser

URL shorteners still serve a purpose for sms, marketing, smart redirects, and more. One of the ways to combat some of the concern around what happens if the service shutdowns is to use your own domain when creating short links. This allows you to export your links since you control the domain. I've been running https://T.LY https://T.LY URL Shortener for the past 2 years and I'm the creator of the URL Shortener Extension (https://t.ly/extension https://t.ly/extension) that has over 400K users. Let me know if any questions around url shorteners.

treesknees 4y ago
My biggest problem with short URLs is they appear spammy. I can't look at it and decide whether it's safe. Just yesterday I received a text from a shortcode with a "bby.me/XXXX" URL saying my Best Buy order was canceled. Turns out it was a legit order I placed nearly 6 months ago and was on backorder that I forgot about. I'd love for a shortening service to offer an "unfurl" tool where I could paste in the URL, and it shows me what the redirected site is without clicking it and potentially activating their clickthrough tracking.
- bithaze 4y ago
  > I'd love for a shortening service to offer an "unfurl" tool where I could paste in the URL, and it shows me what the redirected site is without clicking it and potentially activating their clickthrough tracking. For Bitly, at least, you can add a plus sign to the end of a short URL to preview what the destination URL is. I don't know if other URL shorteners have something similar.
- TimLeland 4y ago
  You are in luck I also built a link unshortener :) https://linkunshorten.com/ https://linkunshorten.com/
- password4321 4y ago
  This one seems the worst: https://github.com/zws-im/zws https://github.com/zws-im/zws (Shorten URLs with invisible spaces.) I played around with it and there was some seriously sketchy interstitial stuff going on.
megous 4y ago
Don't forget phishing... as another purpose.

treesknees 4y ago

My biggest problem with short URLs is they appear spammy. I can't look at it and decide whether it's safe. Just yesterday I received a text from a shortcode with a "bby.me/XXXX" URL saying my Best Buy order was canceled. Turns out it was a legit order I placed nearly 6 months ago and was on backorder that I forgot about. I'd love for a shortening service to offer an "unfurl" tool where I could paste in the URL, and it shows me what the redirected site is without clicking it and potentially activating their clickthrough tracking.

bithaze 4y ago
> I'd love for a shortening service to offer an "unfurl" tool where I could paste in the URL, and it shows me what the redirected site is without clicking it and potentially activating their clickthrough tracking. For Bitly, at least, you can add a plus sign to the end of a short URL to preview what the destination URL is. I don't know if other URL shorteners have something similar.
TimLeland 4y ago
You are in luck I also built a link unshortener :) https://linkunshorten.com/ https://linkunshorten.com/
password4321 4y ago
This one seems the worst: https://github.com/zws-im/zws https://github.com/zws-im/zws (Shorten URLs with invisible spaces.) I played around with it and there was some seriously sketchy interstitial stuff going on.

megous 4y ago

Don't forget phishing... as another purpose.