4 ms·
Does anyone understand why?
by quizbiz 17y ago
Does anyone understand why?
- akkartik 17y agoToday's URL shorteners are yesterday's redirect links. Used to be that we hated redirects and avoided them if we could; now Twitter has suddenly made them cool. If you get people to use your redirects/shortener you gain access to all those delicious traffic analytics on where the eyeballs are going today. Hence the land grab by google and fb in what used to be bitly's private domain.
- mattlanger 17y ago> land grab by google If anyone else was confused by this, I believe it is in reference to http://goo.gl http://goo.gl I had not heard of that project until just now. It's nice to see they're giving it some thought rather than just slapping something together, but I'd love to see "longevity" added to the project goals.
- seldo 17y agoThey might join something like http://301works.org http://301works.org, which aims to archive short URLs even after the company goes away. Although I'm not sure why people are so terrified of short links breaking; long URLs are constantly disappearing.
- snprbob86 17y agoLong URLs constantly disappear, but only one root at a time. If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, all the Wikipedia links would break, but URL shorteners consolidate roots. If bit.ly disappeared tomorrow, it's not just one site that is affected. Furthermore, the use of a redirect breaks traditional mirroring systems. You can't just prepend somemirror.com to the path and expect it to work.
- anigbrowl 17y agocheap brand reinforcement. I'm sure someone will pay the Turkish domain registry enough to overcome their aversion to creating a high-level domain such as twi.tr before long: http://www.101domain.com/tr.htm http://www.101domain.com/tr.htm Edit: I see some enterprising soul in Italy saw the possibilities back in 2005: http://whois.domaintools.com/fuck.it http://whois.domaintools.com/fuck.it