![]() The idea of Google disappearing tomorrow, or having availability problems, is far less likely than the seemingly random people and companies who operate these URL redirection services- often for no visible income.īut what really struck me about these services is how they're a perfect embodiment of a classical computer science concept- the hash table: I often wonder why Google doesn't offer an URL redirection service, as they already keep an index of every URL in the world. Not to mention mobile devices, where space is always at a premium. For example, sending out very long hyperlinks in email is always risky you never know when the email clients will insert line breaks in the links and render them unclickable. Another service, lnk.to, was shut down because of all the spammers abusing their service.ĭespite all the potential problems, URL shortening services are still useful in the right circumstances. URL redirection services are often used by questionable people for nefarious reasons.This is not a great user experience for the person doing the clicking. The only way to find out what's behind that hyperlink is to actually click on it. The URL no longer contains any hints whatsoever as to the content of the URL.What if the redirection service is only sporadically available? That's arguably even worse. What if the URL redirection service goes belly up, as the once-popular did? All your previous hyperlinks are instantly and forever broken.Looks like the best we can do is 3 characters to represent the URL, along with a mandatory 16 characters for the protocol, domain name (everyone drops the leading "But using an URL shortening and redirection service isn't without pitfalls of its own. I found a list of common URL shortening services, so let's see how they compare: It's not a particularly long URL, but every character matters when it comes to Twitter. ![]() That's probably why Twitter automatically converts any URLs over about 30 characters to short URLs using the TinyUrl service.įor instance, let's say I wanted to make a shortened URL version of Steve McConnell's blog. You quickly learn to embrace and live within those constraints, but if you like to post URLs in your Twitter messages like I do, those 140 characters become very dear. One of the design constraints of Twitter is that every message is limited to 140 characters. (I was going to put a screenshot of one of my favorite Twitter messages here, but as I write this Twitter is down. Its bouts of frequent downtime are legendary, even today. Well, when Twitter is actually up and running, at least. My philosophy is, when in doubt, make it public, and Twitter is essentially public instant messaging.
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