11 ms·
http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
- bumblebird 17y agoThe fascination with url shorteners is really worrying and useless. Can we get past this fad?
- furyg3 17y agoIndeed. They're a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
- david927 17y agoAnd a problem to a solution that does.
- catone 17y agoI disagree with that statement. Even before the rise of microblogging, URL shorteners were helpful in certain situations. Which URL would you rather paste in an email for readability's sake: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Oak+Green+Way,+Tampa,+Hillsborough,+Florida+33611&daddr=Smith+Pl,+Cheyenne,+WY+82009&hl=en&geocode=FZJtqQEdxTEV-ympXLQz69zCiDHqS10ETBtlnA%3BFZ89dAIdGE7B-SkH3oAMlztvhzEnHIxvn-l-zg&mra=pe&mrcr=0&sll=34.526616,-93.626595&sspn=19.931717,39.331055&ie=UTF8&ll=34.560859,-93.427734&spn=19.923224,39.331055&t=h&z=5 http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Oak... or http://tr.im/Gw8B http://tr.im/Gw8B In context, the recipient should have no problem anticipating the URL's end point (i.e., you probably just wrote something like, "here are some directions to my house:"), but using the shortened URL makes the email much more readable and prevents any potential screwy scrolling issues that might be caused by an ultra unwieldy URL borking their email software. That's just one non-microblogging use case for one site that spits out very long dynamic URLs -- there are many use cases for many sites. TinyURL, et. al. certainly did (and continue to) solve a problem, imho. And they've become even more useful for microblogging sites like Twitter, on which character limit constraints (which essentially defines that type of service) require that URLs be shortened. [EDIT: I know HN auto truncated that Google Maps URL, but it is a 355 characters long -- and most email software (my use case) wouldn't auto truncate the URL in the same way. So readability would be negatively affected for the recipient by using the long URL instead of the short one.]
- dkersten 17y agoThe former. It shows the reader not only where I'm sending them, but even gives them an idea of what to expect, not to mention the whole dead links problem that will inevitably occur when these sights finally go down. What I would normally do is something like this "<loads of text> Check out my map here [1] <more text>" and at the end put "[1] http...", that way a giant ten page url doesn't interfere with the message, yet I don't have to shorten it either. If I think the precipitant won't understand what I mean, I'd put more details in, eg [1 below] The ONLY place where I'd consider using a url shortener is printed material, since its easier to type in by hand than a giant url, but this has the same dead link problem, especially if printed in magazines.
- catone 17y agoI like your footnote idea, though I think it seems fairly unnatural for casual communication. To me, short URLs seem like the more user-friendly solution. I'm also still not sold on the dead link problem for two reasons. 1. You're already relying on one site (in this case Google) not to go down or change its dynamic URL patterns. Certainly adding another layer increases the chances of a dead link, but any time you link to something on the web you're taking a risk of sending someone to an error page. 2. Most instances in which you'd use a short URL -- such as email -- are for instant communication in which the recipient is likely to visit that link in the next day or two. In other words, you wouldn't link to a short URL in the body of your web page or blog (something with more permanence on which you want to be sure the link works months or even years from now), but for email or Twitter messages, which are generally fleeting and timely, that matters less. As long as the link works right now then all is good. If the person visiting the links wants to save it for later, they'll more than likely bookmark it, cutting the shortener out of the loop anyway.
- dkersten 17y agoSure, but it doesn't change the "Oh, some random site, I have to click on it to see what it is" vs "oh, its google maps, and I can also see the street in the url, i'll save that for later" loss of information in shortened urls. I dunno, you can use url shorteners if you want, but Im not convinced of their usefulness, thats all.
- anigbrowl 17y agoa solution to a problem that doesn't exist I do not use them, but long URLs are a pain in many contexts, and it's not always possible to [link]wrap a tag around it[/link]. Server > client communication has gotten incredibly flexible, but client > server or client > peer communication is still mostly text-driven, and many URLs are not text-friendly or human-friendly. The widespread use of these shorteners strongly argues that they do solve a problem, just not one that matters to you as a programmer.
- dzohrob 17y agoIf the problem doesn't exist, why do so many people find them useful?
- comster 17y agodeath to tiny urls! I want context back!
- Pistos2 17y agoI was against shorteners for a long while, but you can't argue against the fact that it lets you fit more in your message when you have a character limit to deal with, such as with Twitter, identica, FriendFeed, etc. I try to restrict my use of shorteners to microblogging. When following shortened links, I just use common sense and take into account how much I trust the source of the shortened URL. In practice, this has worked very well for me.
- sili 17y agoWhat if Tweeter and other places that have message length limit ignore the length of the URL in you post?
- jiaaro 17y agoThey can't do that due to text-message length restrictions
- slig 17y agoThey should have their own url shortner.
- stuartjmoore 17y agoEvery major website should have their own URL shorter. People would be more willing and trusting to click a random link found on Twitter if it's from Gizmodo's short URL rather than bit.ly. Then again, people shouldn't click random links.
- thom 17y agoThe stats that you can get out of something like bit.ly are quite useful. Or at least ego-strokingly hypnotic.
- bumblebird 17y agoI'd say they were largely unuseful and inaccurate :/
- windsurfer 17y agoI use an extension, like many others, that automatically "follows" every url shortener url on a page. Your stats are likely skewed.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Raphael 17y agoSomehow uses IDN TLD to eschew the TLD altogether. Let the landgrab begin!
- russss 17y agoNo, it is the TLD (for Tonga). Somehow they hawked out their TLD A-record. (edit: turns out it's actually run by the ISP who operates the .to TLD)
- charlesmarshall 17y agoyeah, got root level on the tld .. how did they manage that..
- rbanffy 17y agoWhen it comes to national TLDs and how a company can have this level of access... I don't want to know...
- russss 17y agoCountries can, and frequently do, sell the rights to their ccTLDs to third parties. For example, Verisign leases the rights to the .tv domain off the Tuvalu government for $50m/year.
- gort 17y agoSeems to require a dot in the URL: This: http://to./z0ba1 http://to./z0ba1 Not this: http://to/z0ba1 http://to/z0ba1
- Raphael 17y agoDepends on your DNS. Works for some without.
- ars 17y agoThe dns works. But the browser doesn't. Without the trailing dot the browser looks up the .com address. With the dot it works, but then the browser fixes up the url, and removes the dot - so all subsequent requests don't work. (This is for me, using firefox on linux.)
- charlesmarshall 17y agoseems safari users are struggling without the . as well .. probably a webkit issue then edited for spelling mistake
- asmosoinio 17y agoWorks fine here with Google Chrome.
- chrispine 17y agoFine in Opera.
- thom 17y agoChrome doesn't really like the URLs, and Twitter doesn't see them either. Awesome, though.
- edu 17y agoworks fine in chrome for Linux...
- dabeeeenster 17y agoAnd OSX
- Torn 17y agoIt's a DNS rather than a browser issue, I think
- cake 17y agoFunny, it's working under my current configuration with Firefox but not with Opera and Chrome translates it in a Google search. Not the world's best URL shortener...
- thom 17y agoYeah, Chrome does the same for me. I can click through the links just fine, but pasting into the URL bar (which you're probably going to have to do until the world updates its URL regexes) only gives me the option of a search, unless the URL's in the history.
- Pistos2 17y agoWorks fine for me in Opera (10.10), whether clicking or typing.
- pbz 17y agoWorks with Chrome (Windows) just fine...
- mauriez 17y agoregexpes need to be fixed for it. if you have a sentence with http://facebook.com http://facebook.com. - then what is the dot - end of sentence? or end of domain? just having http://to/ http://to/ will not work, since the resolver will look in the local domain first.
- Confusion 17y agoJust what the world needs, YAUS
- jsean 17y agoI smell irony.
- markmywords 17y agoCan someone give me a quick introduction on how this was done?
- Raphael 17y agoA-record by the ISP that runs the .to TLD.
- markmywords 17y agoThx, got confused by the dot after "to" for a second.
- drusenko 17y ago1- Periods (.) don't do anything after a domain (ie www.weebly.com.), but they are useful for preventing the browsers from redirecting to http://www.to.com/ http://www.to.com/ 2- The real domain we're looking at: "to" -- no "suffix" attached (TLD: top-level domain) 3- The .to registry added an A-record for the "to" domain, which resolves correctly. [Edit: Looks like .cm does this too: ;; ANSWER SECTION: cm. 86400 IN A 195.24.205.60]
- mixmax 17y agoIt's so short that hacker news doesn't even show the domain in the heading :-)
- pkrumins 17y agoI wrote a program to find the shortest URL. Enjoy! #!/usr/bin/perl # use WWW::Mechanize; die "usage: $0 <url>" unless @ARGV; $name = 'a'; $m = WWW::Mechanize->new; while (1) { print "Trying http://to./$name\n"; $m->post('http://to./', { url => $ARGV[0], name => $name, 'Witz that URL!' => 'Witz that URL!' }); unless ($m->content =~ /sorry/) { print "You got http://to./$name\n"; exit(0); } $name++; }
- charlesmarshall 17y agoseems they have problems if the same url is used more than once.. the subsequent additions all break .. you can get around it by adding a query string on to the domain your shortening like ?like=this
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 17y agoSweet, I got http://to./m/r http://to./m/r
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- fix3r 17y agoHave they just broken every single url regex out there?
- jfr 17y agoURL regexes which were already broken from the beginning...
- wmf 17y agoIndeed. DNS names without dots have been used for decades in intranets.
- technomancy 17y agoNot to mention http://museum http://museum
- rythie 17y agoHowever what it resolves to depends on you search domain. If I shared http://www http://www on twitter everyone would most likely see a different site. People should really be using http://to http://to. to avoid conflicts with internal servers called 'to'
- patio11 17y agoNo, even worse. They broke many of them... and people won't know which until they are bitten.
- fexl 17y agoIt doesn't work with https.
- est 17y agoTried to register http://to./index.php http://to./index.php Succeeded, but sadly http://to./ http://to./ rewrote it to http://index.php http://index.php instead.
- rudd 17y agoMaybe it's something with my corporate routing/firewall/who knows, but I just get an error saying my browser can't find it (no matter the browser). For that reason I really hope this doesn't catch on.
- nollidge 17y agoI think my corporate proxy is blocking this as well, or perhaps our DNS servers or something. In any case, I assume there will be a large swath of people for whom this redirection will not work.
- synnik 17y agoMy problem with shorteners really boils down to the conceivable scenario where one of them gets hacked and sends everyone to a malicious site. I also like to know where people are sending me, but that is a secondary concern.
- poli 17y agoHmm... http://to./ http://to./ was translated as http://to./mt8hm http://to./mt8hm ! That's longer than the original...
- amackera 17y agoThe entire point of having a domain "name" is to have a human-readable representation of an address. Take the human readable part out of the URL and you're left with useless.
- FreeRadical 17y agoThis is an excellent point.
- seldo 17y agoThis is why it makes more sense to run your own URL shortener, and make it discoverable using a pattern like rev:canonical: http://sites.google.com/a/snaplog.com/wiki/short_url http://sites.google.com/a/snaplog.com/wiki/short_url
- pyre 17y agoBecause: http://milkandcookies.net/2008/07/12/?lang=en_US&cntry=US&source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3D123%26lang%3Den-US&geoloc=-45.001,-53.175 is pretty readable and useful!
- blhack 17y agoI'm not sure if you're trying to make a point here but yes, that is pretty readable and useful.
- genieyclo 17y agoRegistrar: http://www.tonic.to/ http://www.tonic.to/
- chollida1 17y agoOddly when I try to "shorten" their url http://www.to/ http://www.to/ it gets mapped into: http://www.to/jNUqgaaD8k http://www.to/jNUqgaaD8k :)
- rajusykam 17y agocan someone tell me the real domain name of http://to./ http://to./ ?
- CGamesPlay 17y agoI think users of Squid get sent to http://www.to/ http://www.to/ ...
- dasil003 17y agoHoly cow, this makes bit.ly look like long-domain-name-i-spent-10-dollars-on-just-to-put-one-snarky-word-in-96-point-helvetica.com
- Morieris 17y agoWondering how many people tried going to long-domain-name-i-spent-10-dollars-on-just-to-put-one-snarky-word-in-96-point-helvetica.com like me...
- shuri 17y agohttp://to./loop0 http://to./loop0
- ivankirigin 17y agobit.ly isn't winning because of the length, but because of the reliability, commitment to persistence, anti-spam, and analytics. This is blindingly obvious. A few characters shorter just doesn't matter.
- jcdreads 17y agoI can't believe no one here seems to be using http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/ http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/
- ericd 17y agolol wow, amazing landing page text. 'THINK ABOUT IT: If your grandmother sees this link: http://bit.ly/zPWG6 http://bit.ly/zPWG6 she'll think, "Hmm, does someone want me to fly to Lithuania to get my teeth fixed?"'
- mauriez 17y agothats old news. Dot TK had that for ages. go to http://tweak.tk/ http://tweak.tk/ and read the technical part. They do it better though http://tk./abcde http://tk./abcde is http://abcde.tk http://abcde.tk which is even on character shorter ;)
- mauriez 17y agobtw: http://tk./ http://tk./ works as well ;)
- rajusykam 17y agocan you please tell me the actual domain name ? I am dieing for last 24 hrs.
- 0-0 17y agoLooks like they put up a secret password now.
- ptarjan 17y agoAnyone brute forced it yet?
- dangrover 17y agoDarn. http://to/life http://to/life was taken. Oh well. L'chai-im!
- joshu 17y agoThis was my idea originally. I talk to the guy that runs the registrar occasionally (I got burri.to 12 years ago...)
- neilk 17y agoThank you for this. I now have another example to use when I bitchslap people who don't read domain name RFCs.
- 1981 17y agoCheck http://w.ai http://w.ai
- prodigal_erik 17y agoSomeday one of these guys is going to switch back to using ftp://. Sure, they'd have to proxy or cache everything (no redirect responses), but hey, it's shorter.
- rajusykam 17y agocan you please tell me the actual domain name ? I am dieing for last 24 hrs.
- pvandehaar 17y agoI'm aware that restructuring the Domain Name System is not practical at this point but here's my idea: Domains should work hierarchically and be privately operated. Google Search would be "http://Google/Search/Web http://Google/Search/Web ". A company would buy "http://Org http://Org " and run a forwarding service so that "http://Org/RedCross http://Org/RedCross " forwarded to the respective site. This would allow "http://a/ http://a/ " to be a forwarder and, best of all, for the web to be fully recursive. Seems like the possibilities for such a system are limitless. For example, an internet-archive would be the normal site with "archive/" injected. There are of course many complex details and inefficiencies, but it would greatly improve human-readablity, making things more easily-explainable. This could partially be based on all file-extensions being in the file-data rather than in the name and all folders having an "index" file that represented them (which could, then, be any type of file). I'd like to have an explanation for down-votes, please.
- charlesmarshall 17y agoaww.. they've now added password protection. existing ones still work though