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Shorten this
- pwim 17y agoExcept if someone tweets a link like http://www.zeldman.com/2009/08/10/shorten-this/ http://www.zeldman.com/2009/08/10/shorten-this/, it will get shortened by a 3rd party shortener.
- jerf 17y agoI don't use Twitter. Would it automatically shorten http://zeldman.com/?p=2233 http://zeldman.com/?p=2233 ? Does it just shorten all links, or just ones that need to be shortened? I'm assuming all, since non-shortened links can't be "monetized". (Feh.)
- Semiapies 17y agoIt doesn't shorten all links. Personally, I suspect the real source of the objection to URL shorteners is that they break referrer tracking and other sorts of ad-related analysis.
- brandon272 17y agoI find that orange background to be obnoxious. I wouldn't want to read his blog for more than a minute or so. But maybe that's what he was going for? ;)
- Semiapies 17y agoConsidering how many links from TinyURL and other sites I've made that still work fine, but point to URIs that 404 without any redirection or sensible handling by the host, I remain unimpressed with this image of zillions of useless, shortened links choking the web. That said, bits like this suggest that it might be slowly dawning on people that in 2009, we don't need mile-long URIs.
- joshu 17y agoAgain, it's not literally the issue of "zillions" of bad links. It's that adding it's yet another party in the middle that might fail, dissapear, etc at an inconvenient time. What if your business relied on tr.im, for example, when they dissapeared? What if you'd used them in print so they were easy to type in?
- Semiapies 17y ago(Not literal zillions?! :) ) Yes, I get the additional point-of-failure concern. Except, in practice, the points of failure seem to be squarely on the provider end, not the shortener in the middle.
- ZachPruckowski 17y agoIt's a point-of-failure issue. As a general rule of thumb, dependencies are bad. They introduce "uncontrollable" risk into things. Obviously, websites and bloggers and web-apps can't do much about having the Internet as a dependency, but I don't want to have half my publicity for my content* reliant on a web service that could well be completely fly-by-night. * - At this stage in my life, such publicity and content are only hypothetical :(
- Semiapies 17y agoFly-by-night is to be avoided in all things. I would recommend picking a shortener that's been around more than a short while and seems healthy, certainly - just as I would recommend picking a hosting company that has the same qualities.
- ZachPruckowski 17y agoEven the major shortening services are fly-by-night relative to other services one depends on. They're even fly-by-night relative to Twitter, for the most part, much less something like Wordpress, and infinitely less than something like Google or Apache.
- ZachPruckowski 17y agoFundamentally, the problem I see with the URL-shortening "market" is that there's almost no entry-cost, it's cheap to run, and the margins are very small. How much code is a URL-shortening service? Like 50 lines of code + a mysql table? It's like a day's work, maybe two, to handle 90% of the features people need. And it's like a few MB of database and almost no processing power for each request. And there's like no lock-in. I have no reason to use bit.ly over TinyURL or =>.ws, because they're all nearly the same, and it's not like they'll retro-actively break the links if I use another service. As a result, they're competing with almost zero differentiating features in a market with no entry costs, no lock-in, and no obvious way to monetize. There's no way most of these services are going to stick around when they realize this.