Down with URL shorteners

http://jacquesmattheij.com/Down+with+URL+shorteners

by jacquesm • 16 years ago

10 14 16 years ago

klync• 16 years ago

I hate url shorteners too, for all the reasons the author lists and more. But the article is wrong in stating "They serve no purpose other than to create a short link..."

Actually, while that is their primary purpose, they are very attractive to the people who use them because they give you a click tracking on your instance of the URL post, regardless of who owns the target website.

For me, this is actually another negative of the whole concept of URL shorteners. But it's a huge draw for the people using them.

jaspero• 16 years ago

There has been increasing use of url shorteners by spammers. The problem is you don't know which domain you're heading to. My mantra: treat all short urls as spam.

Only issue is with the CMS urls. I think it should be made 'best practice' rather than just 'SEO optimization', to use URL rewriting by CMS developers.

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Google: [url shorteners evil].

What does your article add to this discussion, Jacques? I mean, besides points to your karma score? ;)

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

I'm not aware of any concerted effort to get rid of url shorteners (other than by the Libyan NIC, that is ;) ).

tptacek2• 16 years ago

The authoritative place to start is probably 'joshu's article:

http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

Yes, there is definitely a concerted effort to get rid of URL shorteners.

scott_s• 16 years ago

Really? I'm surprised someone as active as you on HN could have missed all of the shortner-hate.

sjs382• 16 years ago

The ideal situation for URL shorteners (in my opinion) is for the short URLs to be provided by the content publisher AND the short URLs should easily translate to their long URLs.[1] Look at how YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC9Ss4dguu4 is shortened to http://youtu.be/lC9Ss4dguu4) or Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reader-Wifi-Graphite/d... translates to http://amzn.com/B002Y27P3M) does it, for a good example.

They aren't the shortest possible URLs, but they clearly show the content provider in the URL, which is great.

I actually created a web app and API (hosted on Google App Engine) to generate these publisher-provided short URLs, but never published it. I'll polish it off a bit tonight and post it here.

[1] This is my personal ideal. Being provided by the content publisher should be enough, in my opinion.

ibagrak• 16 years ago

I've been frustrated by short URLs in my Twitter feed too. So frustrated, in fact, that I wrote an app to "peel" them. It's a Chrome extension that shows you where the link is going before you click. Google App Engine fetches page headers on your behalf and gives you back the real link.

It's called LinkPeelr, and you can check it out here: http://linkpeelr.appspot.com

jusob• 16 years ago

That's why 301works exists (http://www.archive.org/details/301works). Granted, even if one of the URL shortener part of this group goes down, it would be a pain to get all the sort links replaced, but this would be possible.

DjDarkman• 16 years ago

CMS support for short links is an interesting and more healthy idea.

Down with URL shorteners

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