4 ms·
Ask HN: Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the world (or your money back)
- thorax 18y agoJust a fun shrinker we cooked-up. It will be a very long time before these urls get very long. For example, Hacker News is: http://➡.ws/퐐 http://➡.ws/퐐 They won't work in IE6, but that's just the way it goes. Should work great on Twitter, hopefully.
- ram1024 18y agobut... the whole point of a tiny URL is it being typable. what's with the symbols :|
- thomasswift 18y agoThis is just awesome.
- albertcardona 18y agoIf only the http:// http:// part was to disappear, that'd be a huge win. For example, emails and http:// http:// addresses are already recognized as such in places like the gnome terminal (which is great then for irssi IRC) or even in this forum comments. But can't just domain.com/that/ be enough info to ne recognized as an url?
- thorax 18y agoMore and more software at least recognizes the "www." prefix and turns it into a link. That saves some keystrokes: www.➡.ws/퐐 http://➡.ws/퐐 http://➡.ws/퐐 The www version actually works on Twitter, so we may make an easy API for that one for tools to use.
- ScottWhigham 18y agoFF3: Address not fount - Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws.
- thorax 18y agoFF3 works great (for me) with these on Mac, Ubuntu, Windows, etc. What platform are you using? Based on your error message, I bet it's not FF3 but whatever showed you the link. If I had to guess, you clicked on the link/page through a feed reader or something? Can you confirm whether it happens when you click directly from this page/site on Hacker News? (which seems to be handling them great)
- sundarurfriend 18y agoI tried going from this page directly, and get the same error message (that too seemingly immediately - doesn't even seem like it tries a DNS resolution, though I'm not sure): "Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws." I'm using Firefox 3.0.5 on Windows XP. FYI, the other link you gave in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498246 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498246 too doesn't work for me: "Firefox can't find the server at www.%e0%b2%95%e0%b2%b0%e0%b3%8d%e0%b2%a8%e0%b2%be%e0%b2%9f%e0%b2%95.com."
- thorax 18y agoThanks a lot for the response. Is the problem like what this guy had? An addon that may have changed Firefox's default IDN resolution? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498378
- ivey 18y agoI love it! I snagged http://➡.ws/♥ http://➡.ws/♥ ... much fun to be had, here. Great job!
- igorgue 18y agolovely!
- ivankirigin 18y agoThat's pretty awesome. but... I'm pretty sure services like Twitter count bytes, not characters. So unicode will not give you much by ways of savings characters. Also, analytics make the shorteners these days, not length. They're all pretty much short enough, no?
- thorax 18y agoThanks for the feedback! Sorry for the accidental downvote-- I have a reflex of downvoting people who reply to the wrong comment and I forgot this was my own thread. Sorry. :( Twitter is doing a character count and doesn't care about bytes-- if it did, it means that tweeting in non-ASCII languages only gets half the characters. That's not exactly fair. If people like the service, we'll be adding metrics and even allow people to search for tinyarrows that were associated with a particular domain. It's more of something fun-- we're not trying to change the world or anything. We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people.
- ivankirigin 18y agoI'd heard otherwise about the byte count, but I don't have any authoritative knowledge on the matter We make a lot of sites/toys and this is just one of the fun ones to share with people. Awesome. There should be more tiny projects. I recall comments on http://tweetbysnailmail.com http://tweetbysnailmail.com saying "this startup will fail". They obviously miss the point :)
- nebula 18y ago
- chanux 18y agoFound it on hacker news & created a Firefox Ubiquity command for it. Here it is http://➡.ws/⇷ http://➡.ws/⇷ (tinyarrows don't show up as links on twitterfox though.)
- chanux 18y agoThough I do not have any problems with tiny arrows on Twitter/Firefox3 Some of my friends complain that they see blah blah instead of the right signs. And when clicked they get errors. Must be a problem with unicode support I guess & it will be a major drawback for the tinyarrows :(
- thorax 18y agoHow are you sending the link to them? What software/tools are involved? Some IM messangers and emails will mess IDN links up, so I'm on a crusade to notify vendors to get things working better. Also these don't work in IE6. Are they using that? Can they click on a page like this? http://ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ.com http://ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ.com ? Thanks in advance!
- chanux 18y agoI just twittered via twitterfox. I checked on my Twitter page & it shows up well for me. But a friend using Fx3 on window$ just complained there are problems viewing it. WC.
- thorax 18y agoThanks a lot for the clarification. If it's not a hassle, can you ask them how they read Twitter? Did they visit the website or get through a different reader?
- thorax 18y agoFYI-- I reported this to the Twitterfox guys, maybe they'll fix that. Thanks for mentioning it.
- vasudeva 18y agoNot working for me in Chrome or Firefox. It's like a Mac-only splinter of the Internet.
- thorax 18y agoChrome and Firefox both work for it fine. I use Windows actually. Are you clicking them from a feed reader? Or from the Hacker News page? What kind of error do you get? Sometimes feed readers or the like urlencode the domain name and it confuses IDN resolvers in browsers. If it's not working directly from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498051 can you tell me what version of Chrome and Firefox you're using? Thanks in advance!
- iigs 18y agoI also experience problems. Microsoft Windows 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236: Service Pack 3) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.48 Safari/525.19 Reading from the front page of Hacker News. The links work but all of the fancy pants unicode stuff shows up as square boxes. This was also a problem when http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ was making the rounds. I'm almost certain it's just a font issue since the Unicode Snowman takes advantage of a font embedding feature specific to IE (and works properly there). I'm not sure anything can be done about this, short of pushing browsers to install fonts.
- thorax 18y agoAh, may be a problem with Chrome 1.0 they're going to fix soon? It works fine in my Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.166.1 Safari/530.1 I'll have to see if I can install the original Chrome 1.0 on another machine and check it out, too. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
- bd 18y agoIt doesn't work at all for me in Firefox 3 on Windows. I get the same response after clicking on all links (feed reader, HN frontpage, this page): Page Load Error Address Not Found Firefox can't find the server at www.➡.ws. This is the same trouble as with Unicode snowman domain. In one discussion here on HN I figured out it's probably because of some security measure to prevent phishing. There are some Unicode characters that look like normal ASCII letters (for example in Cyrillic alphabet), so if Unicode worked in urls, you could create malicious sites that would look like real ones: http://EXAMPLE-ВANK.COM http://EXAMPLE-ВANK.COM (fake) http://EXAMPLE-BANK.COM http://EXAMPLE-BANK.COM (real)
- trjordan 18y agoBookmarklet for it. It just displays the link (no copy to the clipboard like tinyurl, but I don't actually know javascript.), but it's better than nothing, I guess... javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyarro.ws/api-create.php?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href) http://tinyarro.ws/api-create.php?url='+encodeURIComponent(l...) Also, is there a better way to display this in the comments?
- dshah 18y agoVery creative idea. However, I'm not convinced that mainstream users will get comfortable with it (because it looks "different"). This, plus the fact that enough problems can exist from creation/sharing/clicking that it's likely just not worth the hassle. Maybe it's just me, but lack of compatibility is a high price to pay for a character (or two) shorter URLs.
- thorax 18y agoIt's more of an experiment than anything else. It helps get browsers and tools up to standards and gives us a little fun/toy while we're at it. And the URLs are dramatically shorter than a character or two-- for example: http://➡.ws/껻 http://➡.ws/껻 (6 chars after protocol) versus: http://tinyurl.com/aqehn8 http://tinyurl.com/aqehn8 (16 chars after protocol) http://ri.ms/9i0 http://ri.ms/9i0 (9 chars after protocol) It only beats our own ri.ms shrinker by three characters, but that's still something people might consider. And because it uses unicode, it will be a very long time before it moves beyond even 2 character suffixes. Anyway, thanks for the feedback. :)
- agotterer 18y agoThe only problem is most people cant dictate or type the URL. Otherwise, A link to my blog is 1 character and thats awesome!
- brfox 18y agoI really dislike these abbreviated URL services. I prefer a moderately sized and human readable one. I always type URLs into my address bar, also.
- jasonkester 18y agoI'm with you. Recently I've seen people Twittering about Twiddla with tinyurl'd links that are actually longer than the domain name. It's just silly. I think that SEO is really making things worse for URLs. Remember 4 years ago, when "The URL was the New Command Line"? And it was considered a feature that you could look at a URL like http://site.com/user/3916 http://site.com/user/3916 and hack it to get similar pages for other users? Can't do that with http://yoursite.com/this_was_an_article_that_i_wrote http://yoursite.com/this_was_an_article_that_i_wrote. Seems like a step backwards.
- AlexeyMK 18y agoAs long as that's your stated preference, can I interest you in http://look.fo/hacker-news http://look.fo/hacker-news or http://str8.to/hacker-news http://str8.to/hacker-news I built these a while back but they haven't seemed to pick up traction. str8.to uses google's "i'm feeling lucky" - vanity urls without having to go register them.
- psadauskas 18y agoDoesn't seem to work in Firefox 3.0.6 on Linux, strangely enough. I get: Firefox can't find the server at www.%e2%9e%a1.ws.
- thorax 18y agoWorks fine for most people on Linux, too. It's probably one of your addons or settings tweaked from default, see this thread and let me know if that's not the case? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498363
- tome 18y agoI made a cycle :-) http://➡.ws/♲♲ http://➡.ws/♲♲