Terror of tinyurl
From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t. A human-readable URL is a Web address that tells you a lot of useful information about the page it represents. For instance, Salon URLs always tell you the date an article was posted, the section of the site the article appeared in, and a few words describing the subject matter of the article. By comparison, the typical URL at, say, CNET, looks like this: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10895_7-6782817-1.html. It is, essentially, human-unreadable.
In the old days, writers and editors who actually knew and used HTML always appreciated a good human-readable URL; and typically, for the ugly gibberish URLs, we had to thank (some) software architects and (some) publication managers who’d never hand-coded a link themselves. At Salon, we editors knew we’d be typing (and proofing) a zillion of those URLs ourselves; we insisted on something we could work with. (Our developers “got it” too.)
The cause of human-readable URLs got a great shot in the arm when sites began trying to optimize themselves for Google, because Google gives a little extra weight to text hints in URLs. So a lot of sites (like the New York Times) that had a history of human-unfriendly page addresses began to do better.
Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”
When the tinyurl first crossed my radar I understood it to be a convenient way to tame unmanageably long Web addresses. (The Tinyurl site focuses in particular on how long Web addresses break in email messages.)
That’s all fine. But the tinyurl giveth and the tinyurl taketh away. When you encode a Web address as a tinyurl you’re hiding its target. Normally, when I read an article on the Web that has a link, I’ll hover my cursor over the link to see where it points. Even on a site with human-unfriendly URLs like CNETs, at least I can see that the link points to CNET.
With a tinyurl, I know nothing about the link except what the author chose to say about it. I can’t tell if it’s a reference to an article I’ve already read. If I want to find out, I have no choice but to click.
My sense is that tinyurls have grown in popularity with the rise of Twitter (where the strict character limit of messages means you don’t want to fill up a whole message with an URL), as well as the growing use of mobile devices for Web-posting activities. These are perfectly understandable reasons. But still, each time I see a tinyurl I think, there goes another tiny piece of the Web’s transparency.
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October 5th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I use tinyurl for twitter and for sending links that are too long. My only issue about using sites such as these is that one day I’ll click on a cloaked malicious link of some sort. Hopefully my antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and patched system will protect me.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Just in case you didn’t know about it: http://tinyurl.com/preview.php
October 5th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Ironically, I got here via a tinyurl in a Twitter post
October 5th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Tin Foil Hat (http://fivethreenine.blogspot.com/2006/03/tin-foil-hat.html) is a priceless extension to help alleviate a bit of the TinyPain of TinyURL.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
[…] Skunktank wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt a great shot in the arm when sites began trying to optimize themselves for Google, because Google […]
October 5th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
I found that TinyURL works well in the paper and pencil world. Collaborating with a small group of people I’d rather write a TinyURL on the whiteboard instead of some 100 character “readable” URL. They’re also useful for holding a URL ‘in your head’ temporarily.
TinyURL lets you give up the expressiveness of a URL for brevity, which is a good trade off sometimes.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
TinyURL does have a preview setting that you can enable so that when you click a TinyURL link you are shown the address and can then choose to continue to that page…
October 5th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Thanks for the pointers to the preview feature.
Only, I’m one of those eccentrics who uses Opera, and it doesn’t seem to work with Opera. Which is too bad, because, you know, I’m not going to switch browsers for tinyurl’s sake…
October 6th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Couldn’t agree more — especially given that I have an infection of “friends” who find tinyurl to be a great vehicle for disseminating psychologically malicious links (to gross-out pictures and sites).
October 6th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I’d like to hereby nominate Amazon as the creator of the world’s worst and most useless URLs. I never know what the heck I’m pointing at, whether I’m encoding some session information that I shouldn’t, plus they’re like 7000 characters long.
I tried to blog something recently about their new MP3 store and had a devil of a time finding any way to link to it (as did almost every other article about it I saw). That’s stupid and hurts their business.
October 6th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[…] Rosenberg wrote about the Terror of TinyURL. I’m someone who rarely, if ever, clicks on a URL that he can’t see in the […]
October 7th, 2007 at 5:15 am
The other problem with the tinyurl preview is that it a) necessitates an additional click and b) is useless for judging a url based on the status bar preview of the destination. Not to mention the fact that it steals Google Juice.
Don’t get me wrong - I love tinyurl and its brethren (dwarfurl.com is also nice), but I agree that it’s useful in some contexts, and not so much in others.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:18 am
[…] terror of tinyurl The other problem with the tinyurl preview is that it a) necessitates an additional click and b) is useless for judging a url based on the status bar preview of the destination. (tags: comments) […]
October 8th, 2007 at 7:14 am
[…] Rosenberg: Terror of the Tiny URL Growth tied to Twitter […]
October 8th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
You could always use http://www.hugeurl.com to get back at them
October 9th, 2007 at 11:59 am
The real value of link anonymizing like TinyURL is found in the corporate email environs where sending an otherwise innocent URL to a colleague can get you in real trouble with the fascist email filter. Yes I know, keep it off the corporate network. For those who don’t, TinyURL can be pretty useful.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:33 am
The only ISP available to us in the boondocks uses a SPAM filter that will not allow mail that includes a tinyurl link to pass through it.
A Firefox addon that will copy text from websites and also the link also automatically includes a tinyurl link as well. That was what got my outgoing mail blocked for a week or so.
What the tinyurl giveth, it can also taketh away.
October 20th, 2007 at 6:08 am
What you describe, Scott, is exactly the reason why I recommend people to check out Snipr. It has these advantages:
- Shortened URLS can be aliased. Two real-life examples: http://snipr.com/apml_basics (blog post about APML on my blog CleverClogs)
http://snipr.com/twitter_grazr_themed (my Twitter Tools reading list)
If an alias hasn’t been taken yet, you can take it.
- Snipr comes with a bookmarklet.
- URLs shortened with Snipr are left intact by Twitter.
- The original, underlying URL can be edited at all times. This is useful if a page changes its location or when you need to cut off session id details.
- You can open up a history page with all the page URLs you ever shortened. You can then sort them, edit them, copy to the clipboard or delete them.
- You can track how often a page URL has been clicked.
- Snipr offers RSS feeds of all of your shortened URLs and of your most popular ones.
I have no shares, stocks or stakes in Snipr. I just happen to like what its developer, Shashank Tripathi, has been doing very much.
For those who use Firefox and access Twitter from the web, I kindly advise to install the Power Twitter extension by Narendra from 30 Boxes. Power Twitter turns TinyURL and unaliased Snipr URLs into friendly URLS, it can display Flickr images inline and it displays a play-back control for YouTube videos. Highly recommended. You can install it from http://30boxes.com/blog/index.php/2007/04/09/power-twitter-by-30-boxes/
October 21st, 2007 at 3:35 am
[…] more, read Scott Rosenberg’s “Terror of tinyurl”, via […]
October 24th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
The other day I wrote that Power Twitter converts TinyURL and *unaliased* Snipr URLs into friendly URLs.
I don’t recall why I used *unaliased*, but it seems incorrect to me now. Power Twitter substitutes any Snipr URL, aliased or not, with its original page title.
Please forgive the mistake.
November 5th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
You may want to have a look at http://traceurl.com. The shortened URL can be aliased at traceurl.com and you get some stats to your URL. The origin of the accesses to your URLs can displayed on a Google Map.
November 18th, 2007 at 12:02 am
I agree with you. It’s a huge step backward.
More so:
1. Tiny urls defeat the distributed architecture of the WWW
2. Single point of failure. Imaging the service going down — billions of links would be unreachable
3. Creates headaches for text mining community. Can’t rely on the url any more (something has to be done when there are billions of them!)
4. What if a smart service starts sending a pop-up along with the redirected target. Someone can make a truck load of online adv. money with that.
More on that here.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
There’s good and bad. I like the service because you could hide an affiliate ID in your links but I hate it because you could end up at a malicious site since it’s masked.
Btw, I ended up here from http://www.tiny9.com
January 14th, 2008 at 6:26 am
I like a site called http://www.qpyn.com it uses a navigator to punch in the “pyn” numbers. Due to that feature you are able to see the real url on your browser. This has many other cool features check it out if you get a chance.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:13 am
[…] Twitter as long as your site is up. No need to be dependent on the TinyURL service. Here are some reasons why you must not depend on […]
February 28th, 2008 at 10:15 am
[…] there is something wrong with the service in the WWW context. Here’s Tom and here’s Scott Rosenberg of […]
May 5th, 2008 at 12:55 am
I think you’re making one fundamental flawed assumption about normal urls. As the poster said about amazon, urls don’t have to be human readable; that’s something that has emerged mainly because of google and Search Engine Optiomisation.
So if you see a link like http://example.com/something-worth-viewing.html you are automatically assuming that it doesn’t link to malware whereas it just so easily might. The implication is that because it sounds nice it is, and nasty tinyurl links don’t sound nice so aren’t. Hmmmm
May 5th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Actually I was advocating human-readable URLs back in the mid-late 90s, long before Google and SEO. I think it’s a basic usability practice. Many users won’t care, but experienced users are grateful for the transparency in site structure. This was always a principle we tried to follow at Salon. (Once we figured it out!)
As for the phishing issue, transaprent URLs don’t solve it or make it go away, but opaque URLs like tinyURLs exacerbate it, I think. If I bank at wellsfargo.com then I can see if a URL is really wellsfargo.com or if someone has tried to send me to wellsfargo.com.info. (Of course if it’s my bank I should only use my own bookmarked URL anyway since the phishers can mask it, etc.)