6 ms·
What do people use short URLs for nowadays? I used to run one that was "dynamnic" in the sense that you had a number of services that it could resolve and speci
by umsm 13y ago
What do people use short URLs for nowadays? I used to run one that was "dynamnic" in the sense that you had a number of services that it could resolve and specific data you would send the services. But it never gained traction.
/g/search+query
/bing/search+query
/amazon/product+search
/g.images/image+search
etc.
- jere 13y agoI guess that's what I'm asking. The only thing I know it's really useful for is making small QR codes. Of course, a lot of people would disagree about the utility: http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/
- NoahTheDuke 13y agoA coffee shop in my city uses Stampt[0], so I see someone scanning a qr code nearly every day. Still, that tumblr is pretty dang accurate. [0]: http://mobivity.com/stampt/ http://mobivity.com/stampt/
- HelloMcFly 13y agoI use them when sending URLs through text messages.
- Xylakant 13y agoone major use-case is tracking. The short-url goes to a redirector where the visit gets tracked. That's the most annoying part of short URLs.
- bmuon 13y agoI use them when sharing links to things that have seriously long URLs. For example, a link to Google Maps looks like this: https://www.google.com.ar/maps/preview#!q=Great+Pyramid+of+Giza+%D9%87%D8%B1%D9%85+%D8%AE%D9%88%D9%81%D9%88&data=!1m4!1m3!1d3326!2d31.1332704!3d29.9786965!4m15!2m14!1m13!1s0x0%3A0x810c2f3fa2a52424!3m8!1m3!1d3326!2d31.1332704!3d29.9786965!3m2!1i1216!2i739!4f13.1!4m2!3d29.9793187!4d31.1342883 https://www.google.com.ar/maps/preview#!q=Great+Pyramid+of+G... (291 characters long). And other people use services like goo.gl to get analytics on links.
- criley 13y agoI mean, you mentioned Google, so yes, expect 200-300+ character links for the most simple of urls, with about fourteen layers of different metrics baked in. Nothing worse than trying to get a link from Google search results.
- spullara 13y agoTwitter explains their use of t.co on the root of the domain: http://t.co/ http://t.co/
- mike-cardwell 13y agoTheir explanation is a lie. They do it for tracking purposes.
- rammark 13y agoas a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets Doesn't that mean tracking?
- cpeterso 13y agoShort URLs are still useful for sharing links in email (to avoid email encoding or line wrap problems) or verbally to other humans.
- mintplant 13y agoI use http://shoutkey.com/ http://shoutkey.com/ all the time for conveniently moving URLs between computers, or communicating them to others.