4 ms·
A similar service is DecentURL. It generally has slightly longer URLs, but lets you put your own descriptive string in the link, in addition to adding the targ
by decode 18y ago
A similar service is DecentURL. It generally has slightly longer URLs, but lets you put your own descriptive string in the link, in addition to adding the target's domain as the link's subdomain.
http://decenturl.com/ http://decenturl.com/
- pclark 18y agothats a remarkable service. They take this ugly url: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ http://youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ [38 characters] and turn it into this pretty url: http://youtube.decenturl.com/medieval-help-desk http://youtube.decenturl.com/medieval-help-desk [47 characters] their "pretty" url is much longer than the original one. What the hell!?
- decode 18y agoYep, adding information often means adding space. On the other hand, you can shorten http://www.amazon.com/Depends-What-Youre-At/dp/B001DQF7VW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1239113872&sr=8-2 http://www.amazon.com/Depends-What-Youre-At/dp/B001DQF7VW/re... [109 characters] to http://amazon.decenturl.com/depends http://amazon.decenturl.com/depends [37 characters], which adds information and also saves space.
- benhoyt 18y agoYep, that's exactly the kind of thing DecentURL's for. Though it's even better for modifying (say) YouTube URLs which don't have any meaning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4cmrMJul1g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4cmrMJul1g turns into http://youtube.decenturl.com/mr-bean-swimming http://youtube.decenturl.com/mr-bean-swimming
- TweedHeads 18y agoHmm, now I wonder why YouTube doesn't offer 'prettyfied' urls so we don't have to click links like: http://youtube.com/watch?v=never-gonna-give-you-up http://youtube.com/watch?v=never-gonna-give-you-up
- Xichekolas 18y agoNot to be totally facetious, but if they did it'd be much harder to Rick Roll someone.
- ensignavenger 18y agoYou could still use the old, ugly URL for such purposes.
- vaksel 18y agowhats stopping someone from using a different title?
- paul7986 18y agoDo ppl still enjoy a good RickRoll? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XffuAFl18_k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XffuAFl18_k - watch out :) .
- pclark 18y agoprobably the same reason Facebook, Amazon, eBay and tons of other companies don't use prettyfied urls.
- sachinag 18y agoAmazon and eBay have systems going back to 1995 to support; they also expose prettified URLs that redirect to Google. They know they have a (slight) problem there, but they do the best they can with what they've got. As for Facebook, I've always thought they were pretty human-readable.
- benhoyt 18y agoThanks for the mention. :-) Yes, the first thing I thought about twi.bz was, "I thought I already solved this with DecentURL" ... but I didn't quite. Looks like twi.bz is still about shortening URLs, whereas DecentURL is about making URLs decent. Occassionally DecentURL will shorten a URL, but mainly it's intended to turn crazy random-numbers-and-letters addresses into nicely-named ones, while including the domain to make it somewhat "safe" (like twi.bz does).