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You're presuming that URL shorteners don't provide any benefits that may justify the cost of a more fragile system. E.g., bit.ly gives you nice analytics, and m
by jimboyoungblood 17y ago
You're presuming that URL shorteners don't provide any benefits that may justify the cost of a more fragile system. E.g., bit.ly gives you nice analytics, and many links are otherwise impossible to pass via Twitter.
Your argument against shorteners (extra indirection -> more fragile -> bad) works just as well against DNS. The reason why we tolerate the extra indirection of DNS is because there's a substantial benefit to be gained.
- thwarted 17y agoThe inability to pass (some) links via twitter is the fault of twitter (or the "features" thereof), a fault that doesn't suddenly disappear because someone else provides what amounts to a workaround.
- Volt 17y agoDNS servers co-operate and the system has lots of built-in redundancy, whereas URL shortners have none of these properties. It's not just the indirection that makes them fragile.
- jimboyoungblood 17y agoSo if there existed some sort of federated url shortening protocol, all the complaints about shorteners would go away?
- Volt 17y agoProbably not. The only place they're really warranted is on Twitter, so if Twitter did it themselves that would go a long way. There is the whole URL masking annoyance as well, so ideally Twitter would support long URLs, but that might not happen because of the 140 character SMS restriction. A federated protocol seems a little much for this one service which can handle the issue themselves, IMO.
- jacquesm 17y agoFor plenty of fora they're handy as well, then there's IRC Another good reason to have them is to be able to spell them for somebody over a phone line.
- anirbas 17y agoI've also noticed a local free paper (Metro) using tinyurl links in its web section.
- bjelkeman-again 17y agoTwitter should really, really provide a separate field for URLs. This would solve this whole thing. What is the point of an SMS with a shortened URL if you have no internet access? To be able to access the web page you need web access. If you have web access then you can get at the longer URL in the web interface or via Twitteriffic etc.