9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

http://9m.no/

by ehamberg • 12 years ago

202 67 12 years ago

9m.no

DoubleMalt• 12 years ago

I don't think risking url rendered as unicode boxes justifies the reduction of the url by 2 or 3 characters.

Nice proof of concept though.

berdario• 12 years ago

Not only that, but since it will be encoded in utf-8 and then percent-encoded the number of bytes transmitted will actually increase:

something as simple as 邗諾

becomes %E9%82%97%E8%AB%BE , 18 characters!

Still, as other mentioned it's a neat idea that if widespread would make all kinds of encoding mistakes pop up :)

billpg• 12 years ago

But twitter will only count it as two characters. (I guess.)

martin-adams3• 12 years ago

I'll be screwed if I ever have to retype the short URL. So no good for printing on packaging.

jrajav• 12 years ago

Why would you rely on any free third-party shortener for print to begin with?

martin-adams3• 12 years ago

Sounds like both you and I agree that it's no good for printing on packaging. I'm unsure why I'm suddenly defending its use.

frozenport• 12 years ago

As a flier for an event, yes I would and have.

LatencyKills• 12 years ago

Personally, I think this is awesome. If widely adopted it might to help ferret out all the software which still can't properly handle unicode urls (which is probably why it won't be widely adopted). :)

chx• 12 years ago

You should combine this with the trick Tinyarrows is doing since 2008: the domain name is a single Unicode character; I guess Punycode FTW :)

riffraff2• 12 years ago

http://tinyarrows.com/ has existed for years and is actually shorter, i.e. http://➡.ws/鷇

pgl• 12 years ago

Except you need to pick your own UTF-8 character to make it shorter, which is a pain because a lot of them are already taken.

riffraff2• 12 years ago

no you don't, it's just a weird interface. Random UTF8 characters like the above example are generated automatically if you enter a url.

You _can_ input your own to have something like http://✩.ws/awesometastic

edwintorok• 12 years ago

Hmm tinyarrows can link to itself too: http://➡.ws/Z̶̷̡̤̺͎̝͕̺͚̺̖̞̫̘͔̟̈́ͮ̍̃͋̇ͪͨ̎͒͂̍͑̕͡À̿ͣ̓ͩͭ̉ͬ͑̈̀͊́̊...

mp4box• 12 years ago

Probably should block the same domain from shortening.else you'll get something like http://9m.no/婀蒾 (multiple redirects)

buttscicles2• 12 years ago

I created a simple url shortener[0] a while back and though I thought of this I hadn't considered people could add a '.' to the domain to get around that (so http://yl.io/1 becomes http://yl.io./1), which somebody was nice enough to figure out for me ;)

[0] http://yl.io

davidcollantes• 12 years ago

Care to share the source? I like its simplicity!

smoyer• 12 years ago

I got http://9m.no/𑂜൭ for my daughter's website, but I'm wondering whether this helps shrink character count when used for services like twitter. It's not at all readable, but since it's two (I think) 4-byte unicode characters, will that URL be counted as 13 characters or 21 characters?

batuhanicoz2• 12 years ago

Twitter "shrinks" URL's no matter what. My website link is is 11 characters[0], I don't know how shorter it can get.

[0] http://bt.hn

beedogs• 12 years ago

For a while, years ago, http://cx worked.

TheLoneWolfling• 12 years ago

When is a URL shortener not a URL shortener?

http://qntm.org/twit

SanderMak• 12 years ago

Twitter shortens every URL regardless and reserves 23 chars (I believe) for each link in a tweet.

Pxtl• 12 years ago

Obviously the correct answer is for Twitter to incorporate this approach.

quarterto• 12 years ago

Pasting one of those characters in, we see it's counted as one character. However: Twitter replaces all URLs, even shortened ones, with 22-character t.co URLs. Using 9m.no on Twitter is pointless, especially since Twitter displays the original URL for t.co URLs only. Using another shortener, the shortened URL is all that is shown, which isn't very reader-friendly.

batuhanicoz2• 12 years ago

Short URL's have two purposes for me:

- They are easier to spell on the phone (This is not.) - I like to track the clicks (Which I can't do with this.)

But, as a proof of concept, this is nice.

OT: Oh, I'm turning into a real HNer with this comment.

alexcroox• 12 years ago

Your comment is justified. When you think about why you use short URLs that is pretty much it. It used to good for twitter but now they shorten any URL themselves, you don't get any difference in remaining chars whether it's a 4 char domain or 40.

dukerutledge• 12 years ago

The first concern is certainly valid, but since this is using acid state adding click tracking would be trivial.

gojomo• 12 years ago

From the source code README <https://github.com/ehamberg/9m>:

9m Unicode URL Shortener. Generates a shortcut from http://9m.no using two unicode characters, e.g. http://9m.no/പ湛.

The server will choose two characters at random from the all the printable characters and then cross its finger and hope you use a great font.

(This is a horrible idea in many ways and was a quick hack for fun.)

jebus989• 12 years ago

All the usual HN nitpicking and obscure edge case discussion should probably be done in the light of ehamberg's own comment: "This is a horrible idea in many ways and was a quick hack for fun." [0]

[0] https://github.com/ehamberg/9m

wcchandler• 12 years ago

All these people had to do was click "about" at the bottom and find this nugget from the author:

"Made slightly – but not completely – tounge-in-cheek by @ehamberg."

mrtbld• 12 years ago

tounge-in-cheek

“tounge”, typo or some play-on-word I don't understand?

ehamberg4• 12 years ago

Yes, thanks for pointing that out. This was done really quickly and I didn't expect it to get that much attention. :-)

xsace• 12 years ago

9m.no/鼞ϧ

ozh• 12 years ago

http://9m.no/끣⟲ !

jedicoffee• 12 years ago

krl.io son son

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

While this is pretty neat, is there still a market for URL shorteners? It's been mentioned in this discussion already that Twitter does it automatically already - iirc, that was the main use case for shortened URLs. The other use case is gathering statistics (how many people clicked on my link), but the URL doesn't need to be short for that, a simpler redirect service would work just fine for that.

The final one is simple printable URLs which people can enter easily. That's also a valid use case I think, but mainly if you can create your own URL, i.e. shorturl.com/hackernews; a random collection of numbers and letters is hard to type in on a cell phone and easy to mistype.

r0muald• 12 years ago

Printable URLs are a good use case, but printed material has the annoying characteristic of lasting longer than your average web service, including URL shorteners. For printed stuff QR codes are still the most practical option IMHO.

sspiff• 12 years ago

They also have the annoying characteristic of lasting longer than the content they link to more often than not!

normloman• 12 years ago

The click through rate on QR codes is terrible. The two biggest mobile OSes don't have a qr reader installed, ordinary people don't know to download the reader and decode them, and even people with QR readers don't bother to open the app when they can just type the address.

Besides, most QR codes just point to a bit.ly URL anyway (It's a cheap way to track QR usage separately from direct traffic).

taf2• 12 years ago

Yes - for example text message marketing and informational messages that want to include a URL is a growing market.

Aoyagi• 12 years ago

URL shorteners without privacy policy make me feel uncomfortable, but I guess it's understandable in case of a new and tiny project.

mykhal• 12 years ago

why would anyone in the unicode age have to shorten the urls? (:

shanth• 12 years ago

Haskell <3

izzydata• 12 years ago

So, what would happen if I put in a url, then took the generated url and generated a shortened url on that and then did it again for about 1000 times?

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

There's a way to find out!

ehamberg4• 12 years ago

To give you a clue: This was a really quick for-fun project and I did not expect it to get this much attention. ;-)

MaxGabriel• 12 years ago

What was your experience like using Scotty /Acid-State for this project?

ehamberg4• 12 years ago

I had briefly used Scotty before, but never acid-state. All of this is just the result of a discussion at work where my position was “oh, come on! it's not that stupid!”, so I just chose something I though would let me get a test site up and running really quickly.

I would probably polish it a bit more if I knew it would get this much attention, but hey! – it works, and uses almost no resources on the cheapest Digital Ocean account.

I recently saw some discussion about acid-state on Reddit, and it seems that the Hackage developers have had some troubles with it: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/26405r/storing_data...

rcarmo• 12 years ago

Back when Gruber tried to do something like that in his @daringfireball Twitter feed, it was so incredibly annoying to have the links fail on all my mobile devices that I set up a Python script to convert the links and re-post them under a @darlingfireball account...

He recently posted about that not making sense anymore due to Twitter's URL shortener, but I don't have the link handy offhand.

PDegenPortnoy• 12 years ago

Added to Ohloh: https://www.ohloh.net/p/nine_m, or to stay stylistically consistent: http://9m.no/ꋅ곁

tytso• 12 years ago

This is a great way of finding all sorts of bugs in your support of Internationalized Domain Names.

nawitus• 12 years ago

Didn't work in a tweet.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

http://9m.no/؞雅 ⇩ http://www.google.com

Kind of disappointed I got a two character code. Has he used up all the one character ones yet? Time to start a new domain!

tunesmith• 12 years ago

I tried shortening a vanity domain of mine, and the asian characters can roughly be translated as "produce fire from the rays of the sun and break wind". I don't think I'll market that shortcut.

matsuu• 12 years ago

http://縮.jp

9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

Related Stories