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Show HN: Zigg.be – A link shortener that creates short speakable links
I created this a year or so ago but recently made updates and I thought people might like to know that it exists.
I made this to easily send links or text to someone else verbally, like over the phone or over voice chat (which is what I made it for). The goal is to be able to tell the link to someone else without being ambiguous or needing to spell it out, so I grabbed the words off a Grade 5 level dictionary. I understand that the domain itself doesn’t qualify but I’m trying to get a better domain.
- basicallydan 14y agoFracking. Awesome. Good job.
- _chendo_ 14y agoI created this a year or so ago but recently made updates and I thought people might like to know that it exists. I made this to easily send links or text to someone else verbally, like over the phone or over voice chat (which is what I made it for). The goal is to be able to tell the link to someone else without being ambiguous or needing to spell it out, so I grabbed the words off a Grade 5 level dictionary. I understand that the domain itself doesn’t qualify but I’m trying to get a better domain. I hope others find it useful!
- _puk 14y agoYou have an API for this? I imagine this could be of use to "the other link shorteners". It's a great idea, and with reference to scaling, perhaps short well know quotes / sentences could work.
- _chendo_ 14y agoNot just yet, need to do more thinking about how I'd like it to work with regards to preventing abuse etc. I'd like to keep the link size down because one of the use cases is for say a lecturer giving a link to class. Keeping it short lets the lecturer easily write it on the board, and also faster to type.
- shiftpgdn 14y agoIs there a github repo or source available for this?
- jimmyyoung 14y agoPeople could find this useful, also I love the subtle amazon referral.
- Praveens 14y agoIts a nice feature you got there. Have you thought about creating permanent links? Are you going to blog on how you made it?
- asiekierka 14y agoI do not think permament links on this would be a good idea simply because of the far smaller number of combinations.
- _chendo_ 14y agoIndeed, although namespacing permanent links would be doable, it wouldn't make much sense and other URL shorteners would do the job.
- davelocity 14y agoPermanent links for paying accounts perhaps?
- _chendo_ 14y agoThat's one of the ideas :)
- cynwoody 14y agoWorked fine when I just tried it. Question is, what happens to those snappy URLs when more than a few (thousand, million, billion) folks discover it?
- _chendo_ 14y agoBefore the changes I made recently, the maximum expiry you could have was 12 hours, which some people thought was too short, hence I bumped it up to 7 days. One way is to decrease the maximum expiry for guests and allow people to sign up to gain access to longer expiries, which keeps the words in use down. Otherwise, I can add more adjectives to increase the number of possibilities. There's already an adjective layer when the single word is exhausted.
- ngokevin 14y agoNumbers or compound words? /bananastand /potato9
- tripzilch 14y agoif you say "potato9" you won't know if it's maybe spelled "potatonine"
- davelocity 14y agoLots of ways to increase the amount of available permutations. for example, adding colors to the names (bluerose, pinkrose...) then even changing the position (roseblue, rosepink...). Should be a solvable issue unless he gets really really popular.
- grandpoobah 14y agoNow you just have to spell zigg.be to the person over the phone
- _chendo_ 14y agoI'm working on that :)
- pavs 14y ago"z" are also pronounced "zed" outside USA. Actually that's how I learned to pronounce it first.
- onlyup 14y agoI thing everyone still says Zig with an American Z
- easy_rider 14y agoagree. cigbee with a c? no zzzigg dot be zig.b Doesn't work. No zee ai gee gee dot bee ee kthnxbai
- georgemcbay 14y agoA worse problem with the name, IMO, is that ZigBee is already a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee My first thought was "what does url shortening have to do with wireless communication"?
- _chendo_ 14y ago
- conroy 14y agojazzychad made something similar a year or so ago http://shoutkey.com/ http://shoutkey.com/
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoIt may be coincidence but are you choosing from a dictionary of real words or doing some clever Markova chaining? I am guessing the former - if so is there not an upper limit to total active links ?
- nwh 14y ago> some clever Markova chaining I've attempted this in the past with bizarre results. If you're going to do it on a public site, make sure there's a blacklist of profanity. People generally get upset when sent a link containing a racial slur.
- lccarrasco 14y agoI remember a story regarding this, where even with a filter they noticed that some words could still be read like cursing so they decided to go with a Japanese dictionary... that produced words like fukushita. (edit) Ha, found the link http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generator.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generato... , how could I forget it was on thedailywtf.
- roguas 14y agonot overally consistent... links are speakble - try to make domain speakable like short.be, better yet short.com (as everyone knows .com) how one's supposed to know how many 'g' is there ;]
- adcoelho 14y agoHow's the choice of new words from the dictionary complexity- wise?
- _chendo_ 14y agoAll meant to be pretty simple to type and spell. Let me know if spot any that should be removed. I know 'eye' should be removed, etc
- vanwaril 14y agoWhat about a trade-off between compound-ness and duration? If you want a 10-minute link, you really probably want something that's dead-simple to say like "zigg.be/fit". If its a 30-day lease, you might be willing to go for "zigg.be/greencatjumps" This allows shorter URLs to stay in a faster reuse pool.
- knightni 14y agoThis is awesome, thanks :-)
- koide 14y agoYou could increase availability by deduping (typing twice the same target gives you different shortenings)
- ghubbard 14y agoIs there any way to tell if the link I have is expired, or show what the long version of the link is before I visit it or am I likely to get goatse'd if I'm a minute too late clicking the link?
- pax 14y agoI would like an option that resets the counter on each access, so urls are always valid for a timeframe from the last access. what about self destructing links - as an option - it goes away upon being accessed - could be fun for text, although, entirely useless :))
- glazskunrukitis 14y agoWhy are short links being regenerated when the source link is the same? For example, when I try to shorten http://google.com/ http://google.com/ the short link comes out different each time. You would save _a lot_ of words by re-using them.
- captn3m0 14y agoIts already saving a ton of links by expiring them.
- zcam 14y agoExpiration on a url shortener means linkrot, which is the #1 problem with such services, so seeing this as a feature is a bit strange to say the least.
- _chendo_ 14y agoZigg.be links (at least they way they are now) are not meant to be published. How do you propose I implement this with permanent links?
- zcam 14y agoThey are links, meant to be shared, maybe published, it depends on your users behavior, not what you want them to do. Even if they were only supposed to be private, what if my dad wants to find that Steve Jobs Bio again 1 month from now.
- popey 14y agoThis was also done some years back as http://linkpot.net/ http://linkpot.net/ so podcasters could read out URLs on their show more easily. However by just testing it I think I broke it..
- joetech 14y agoGreat idea. I always hated trying to remember tiny urls seen in print, as well.
- onlyup 14y agoThis is actually smart!
- businessleads 14y agoI laughed for a really long time about the silent second g.