What is Digg?85 Comments
- andrewcsayer, on 11/20/2007, -4/+79What about http://hugeurl.com/ ?
- joe10, on 11/20/2007, -2/+43There are usability issues to link shortening as well as functional risks like the one discussed here. Being able to read the actual URL of the link you're about to click on has basic usability value that services like TINYURL obfuscate.
- dvsbastard, on 11/20/2007, -1/+29I rarely click on Tiny URL links as they contain absolutely no information on the link... and this can be a particularly dangerous for those of us at work...
- inactive, on 11/20/2007, -1/+24I think I am more interested in hugeURL than I am the actual story.
- neonsurfer, on 11/20/2007, -0/+23typo this http://snurl.com/1tvry or this http://digg.com/tech_news/TinyURL_Outage_Illustrat ... with my phone?
- scabbers, on 11/20/2007, -2/+17I'd rather see exactly what I'm clicking on, anyway.
- grumpyrain, on 11/20/2007, -0/+13Except Digg screws it up if you edit your comment.
- ianmurrays, on 11/20/2007, -0/+12Tinyurl has an option to show the url BEFORE redirecting you to the link. You have to activate it manually though.
- robmaguire, on 11/20/2007, -0/+11I try to keep my tinyurl/snurl use to a) Twitter and b) incredibly long urls (like Google search results).
- jameshighmore, on 11/20/2007, -2/+12http://tinyurl.com/2q9j9y
- RoboRay, on 11/20/2007, -0/+10Why would I want to bother doing that when they could have simply given me the real URL to begin with? I consider use of TinyURL and it's ilk to be just a way to cut down on traffic.
- marshallk, on 11/20/2007, -0/+10Agreed, not to mention trackbacks and link juice, search feeds for links, etc. Sometimes they are very useful though.
- ThantiK, on 11/20/2007, -1/+11Anyone else find this extremely suspicious that only a few days ago, an article was posted on slashdot complaining/asking about TinyURL "damaging" the internet infrastructure? Here's the URL: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/18/13 ...
- HanSolo69, on 11/20/2007, -0/+9THIS JUST IN: the fact that any internet service can suffer an outage illustrates that particular service's risks
- drewolanoff, on 06/10/2008, -1/+10I noticed that once TinyURL went down, Twitter was basically useless for me since I use it mostly to share and click links to blog posts, videos, etc. Why isn't twitter building its own service?
- VenTatsu, on 11/20/2007, -0/+8From my Google apps for your domain:
The Google Team to me
Dear James,
Earlier an email was sent regarding your [domain removed] Google Apps account, notifying you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM PDT on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 ...
Professional services tend to give you fair warning when they know they will take down a service for one reason or another. That's why in the industry 'downtime' and 'unplanned downtime' are treated separately when calculating reliability. - inactive, on 11/20/2007, -1/+8That's funny, I don't remember anyone asking your opinion!
- fkr3, on 11/20/2007, -1/+8There is no reason software can't shorten the urls in the presentation anyway, as digg does with the ...'s snipping off the end of a long URL. Much more reliable and not dependant on anything, and in terms of usability for cut and pasting long urls, big deal it's the same effort to cut and paste a short url anyway.
- AshTR, on 11/20/2007, -1/+8Just copy the link and put preview.tinyurl.com/charactershere instead. Then you can see what it goes to.
- Murdats, on 11/20/2007, -0/+7the benifits of firefox telling me whats in a tab before i view it.
- sirdaz, on 11/20/2007, -3/+10This just shows how reliant on 3rd party services people have become. All these services and we don't know when they will go down. Imagine how many people would be stuck if google mail went down for a couple of hours? Not many people have control over much they actually do online any more.
- Coolaborations, on 11/20/2007, -0/+6good question -- I DO prefer to use my own short URLs compared to tinyurl (and not just because mine are shorter ;)
- grumpyrain, on 11/20/2007, -0/+6Me too. I guess I would just like to keep my job.
- ephrils1, on 11/20/2007, -1/+7Huge URL is the wave of the future! B)
- ChromaVita, on 11/20/2007, -1/+7One day, I am going to buy their website, and make all the links everywhere forward to goatse... It'll be hilarious. G-day draws near...
- kalemba, on 11/20/2007, -3/+8good. i HATE tinyurl and its ilk. why should anybody blindly click an obfuscated link? i hope it goes down forever.
- inactive, on 11/20/2007, -1/+6HugeURL FTW.
- NJank, on 11/20/2007, -2/+7hookers and your mom aside, please clue me in to services where you DO know when they will go down? (sorry for the jab, but couldn't resist.)
- xino, on 11/20/2007, -0/+4Me three, but it's still great in case you want to write a URL down for future reference, twitter, etc as long as it is running.
- dpknc84, on 11/20/2007, -0/+4I put a good portion of blame on online media sites who are obsessed with creating long url's to stories that include everything from session ids, site sections, content ids, dates, etc all in the location bar. It's not necessary; design your site structure better.
- darkphan, on 11/20/2007, -0/+3This wont work for services like Twitter because they shorten the URL's to reduce the message length, since Twitter is used a lot via SMS, and messages are limited to a short length.
- doctordbx, on 11/20/2007, -1/+4Ah damn. Perhaps an excuse to get out and go watch a movie or meet some girls.
- GothAlice, on 11/20/2007, -0/+3Or just add /preview or ?preview or somesuch to the end of TinyURL URLs. This can be done automatically using a Firefox snippit or bookmarklet.
- bmc152006, on 11/20/2007, -3/+6google should buy tinyurl
- xino, on 11/20/2007, -0/+3When it is simple enough to give the real URL, I totally agree, but some times it isn't simple. One time I was in a class and the teacher put this really long URL on the chalk board and we all wrote it down, but I was the only one that was able to get to the URL and later found out that was because everyone else didn't capitalize one letter. Another case is digg. People post long URLs and they get cut off after hitting the submit button.
- thegreypilgrim, on 11/20/2007, -0/+3Alternative = http://urltea.com/
- Bamborzled, on 11/20/2007, -0/+3Because you touch yourself at night.
No Ron Paul in the Technology section '08 - Coded1, on 11/20/2007, -0/+3What does it take to run a server for hash maps?
- yahoofrom, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2stop duplicating my comment digg.
- DangerCollie, on 11/20/2007, -2/+4What a moment to borg their DNS and steer tiny URL's to your malware with extra cheese site in Russia. Always thought that was the big risk with tinyUrl.
- thefinger, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2I'd say, never use sites like TinyUrl for anything longterm. They're meant to be used only for a short time. At least that's how they should be treated, though they might claim that the shortened url can be used indefinitely. TinyUrl is handy, but nothing online should be considered permanent. You find a link to a vid on YouTube, use TinyUrl to hash it down before you share it with someone over email or IM or whatever. Otherwise, consider it disposable.
- sdm011, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2Oh know how will we possibly rick roll people!
- luxette, on 11/20/2007, -4/+6Snitter uses Snurl. Yay Snitter!
- 3mpire, on 11/20/2007, -1/+3http://tinyurl.com/2q9j9y
- digitalarcanum, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2yeah, such as goatse links.. *shudder*
- Gryffydd, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2In other news, thousands of people were saved from seeing Tubgirl last night.
- kurupttek, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2http://tinyurl.com/32v8y9
- travbrack, on 11/20/2007, -1/+3"...where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do"
Dugg - spiffytech, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2You'd need little more than a database with a table pairing hashes with real URLs. This table is updated with new hashes as they're created. We'll create site.com/abcd as our hashed URL.
When you go to site.com/abcd, Apache's mod_rewrite (or another web server's similar function) can redirect you to a single PHP page used for all hashed URLs. The page would look at the referrer URL (the URL you came to that page from; in our case, site.com/abcd), find abcd in the database, and redirect you again to the real URL. - Nossie, on 11/20/2007, -0/+2thats actually an interesting thought...
1. create smallurl.com
2. let viral marketing and word of mouth make your site popular for shortening urls...
3. wait a year or two then change all the small urls to vi@gr@ and bigger ***** sites + stock scams
4. ??? (while a small fraction of users change the links over)
5. Profit! -
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