2008FEB022048
Could delicious have been the solution to the url shortening problem?
"... why not just use real links? shortened urls are a scourge ..."
Evil but useful and probably a cause of much pain in the future.
There is a fundamental problem not being addressed by anyone at the moment, that I can see wrt to pointer urls (urls that point other urls). A cause is misuse of urls by individuals, companies, software apps and services to represent stuff. Currently we have a series of hacks with various companies shortening urls that will probably disappear at some time in the future. Google could probably solve this problem by getting into the url shortening service and simply create a short "google url" along side every url they capture. But we replace one problem (url shortening) with another (proprietary linking).
A common pattern I see now is when a person wants to send urls via twitter that are longer than 140 char, eg: (a Amazon link to "Revolution in The Valley" ~ www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story/dp/.... So they use some shortening service to compress it eg: is.gd/i4kK which totally borked because it looses all the important info you need to decide do I want to click this? Even if the url was shorter, say a flickr link, twitter sometimes returns urls as a tinyurl even if I don't want it shortened. There are many other examples.
Delicious is good in this regard because it acts as a url proxy with a unique url id given for any captured url. Was reliable url identification and shortening something you had in mind at that time creating delicious? ie: delicious.com/url/3818754baa665407ee7e39c5012706e0
Could delicious have been the solution to the url shortening problem?
next >>>
2008FEB022048
Could delicious have been the solution to the url shortening problem?
"... why not just use real links? shortened urls are a scourge ..."
Evil but useful and probably a cause of much pain in the future.
There is a fundamental problem not being addressed by anyone at the moment, that I can see wrt to pointer urls (urls that point other urls). A cause is misuse of urls by individuals, companies, software apps and services to represent stuff. Currently we have a series of hacks with various companies shortening urls that will probably disappear at some time in the future. Google could probably solve this problem by getting into the url shortening service and simply create a short "google url" along side every url they capture. But we replace one problem (url shortening) with another (proprietary linking).
A common pattern I see now is when a person wants to send urls via twitter that are longer than 140 char, eg: (a Amazon link to "Revolution in The Valley" ~ www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story/dp/.... So they use some shortening service to compress it eg: is.gd/i4kK which totally borked because it looses all the important info you need to decide do I want to click this? Even if the url was shorter, say a flickr link, twitter sometimes returns urls as a tinyurl even if I don't want it shortened. There are many other examples.
Delicious is good in this regard because it acts as a url proxy with a unique url id given for any captured url. Was reliable url identification and shortening something you had in mind at that time creating delicious? ie: delicious.com/url/3818754baa665407ee7e39c5012706e0
Could delicious have been the solution to the url shortening problem?
next >>>