URL shorteners
But there are probably times when you need them -- like when you need to SMS someone a link or something. Some urls are > 200 characters long, and won't fit.
So OK, there will sometimes be shortened urls. Fine. But if we're going to have them, can we please, pretty please, do something about their information content? Something like
http://sho.rt/65tyhK
says nothing. But how about this:
http://sho.rt/nytimes/65tyhK
That's a lot better! Now we have a convention where a shortened url for a page under www.xyz.com gets transposed to http://sho.rt/xyz/[noise]. That is a vast, vast improvement.
For virtually every domain, that's probably enough: just take the domain organization name and leave it at that. It might be worth making a few sub-domain exceptions for sites with a lot of different and popular sub-domains, like http://sho.rt/maps.google/88gB6 or http://sho.rt/video.yahoo/29T4, but ordinarily, things like http://sho.rt/flickr/e5Kr8 are going to be great, providing an extra few characters of information does volumes to self-document what's going to happen when you click the url, which would be good for users. ¶ 10:08 PM
Friday, May 8, 2009
URL shorteners are a toxic blight on the web.
But there are probably times when you need them -- like when you need to SMS someone a link or something. Some urls are > 200 characters long, and won't fit.
So OK, there will sometimes be shortened urls. Fine. But if we're going to have them, can we please, pretty please, do something about their information content? Something like
http://sho.rt/65tyhK
says nothing. But how about this:
http://sho.rt/nytimes/65tyhK
That's a lot better! Now we have a convention where a shortened url for a page under www.xyz.com gets transposed to http://sho.rt/xyz/[noise]. That is a vast, vast improvement.
For virtually every domain, that's probably enough: just take the domain organization name and leave it at that. It might be worth making a few sub-domain exceptions for sites with a lot of different and popular sub-domains, like http://sho.rt/maps.google/88gB6 or http://sho.rt/video.yahoo/29T4, but ordinarily, things like http://sho.rt/flickr/e5Kr8 are going to be great, providing an extra few characters of information does volumes to self-document what's going to happen when you click the url, which would be good for users. ¶ 10:08 PM
