Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0
Why I'm starting to hate short URLs
I understand why short URL services are handy, and I know that there are times when you simply have to use them. How else are you to cram giant links in Twitter's miniscule 140 character limit?My problem isn't so much with the truncators themselves. Bit.ly, is.gd, TinyURL, Digg, Ping.fm - I don't have a beef with the service you're providing. I'm also not all that concerned with the recent shouts about how one of those services being compromised could make reaching thousands of shared links impossible.
The thing that's really pissing me off is the way shortened links are being utilized.
Example. If you're browsing a social news site and you find a cool story, you post a tweet with a link to, say, the Digg submission or Slashdot article. Why? You'd rather share a snippet or summary with us than the actual article? Why make your followers and friends jump through an additional hoop?
Worse still are truncators with preview pages, like the one that got me started on this rant. A bit.ly link in my Twitter stream which TweetDeck couldn't expand for me sent me to a preview page. The preview page sent me to a Slashdot item. From there, I was finally able to access the original post.
Enough is enough. It's a waste of bandwidth, time, and it's a needless annoyance. If you read a post and you like it, go ahead and use a truncator. But for crying out loud - point it directly to the item of interest and spare me the song and dance.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mbeebe4 said 2:09PM on 4-09-2009
boo freaking hoo
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jkroeder said 3:34PM on 4-09-2009
Not to mention they're a huge headache when it comes to spammers and others using them for malicious purposes
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oZone said 2:52PM on 4-09-2009
I'm completely agree, that shit gets ridiculous sometimes.
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Donald said 2:58PM on 4-09-2009
This is why HugeURL (http://www.hugeurl.com/) was invented.
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Sam Jordan said 4:50PM on 4-09-2009
Ha, that is awesome. Good job.
gonintendo said 7:31PM on 4-09-2009
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Michael K Pate said 3:26PM on 4-09-2009
This seems to be a popular topic of late.
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html
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AIL said 4:08PM on 4-09-2009
holy gawd you are a whiner of impressive magnitude
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sodapop said 4:30PM on 4-09-2009
I don't think someone who writes for a blog can complain about people who blog blog posts. Tongue tied?
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Steve G said 4:42PM on 4-09-2009
Short URLs are a life saver. Have you SEEN the size of URLs in a SharePoint system???
Don't blame short URLs in general if some people use them in a stupid fashion.
As I'm not a twitterer (i.e. I'm a boring old fart!) I don't see the problems you have.
Steve
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Quikboy said 5:03PM on 4-09-2009
I just send regular URLs through IM or e-mail instead - much simpler.
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Generic said 7:16PM on 4-09-2009
Thanks Lee Mathews for pointing this out. I use Power Twitter extension with Firefox to show me the sites that the link leads to but IMHO it is not a perfect solution.
Anyone out there knows an extension that shows the actual link?
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chris joseph said 9:35PM on 4-09-2009
merlin mann said it better a few days earlier. just saying...
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Bruno Padinha said 5:21AM on 4-10-2009
It may not be the case with Digg, but on Slashdot, frequently, the article itself condenses the idea and gives an opinion, sometimes providing a much broader context to the subject, so if you like the "editorial line", it makes all the sense to steer people to the blog instead of the article, to give them the full picture.
Actually, that's why I frequently direct people to posts in DLS instead of just the link to the apps.
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Kevin said 12:33AM on 4-21-2009
Tinyurl ftw.
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