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Terror of tinyurl

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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.
[tags]tinyurl, urls, human-readable urls, web usability[/tags]

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Comments

  1. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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…

  7. 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…

  8. 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).

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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/

  15. 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.

  17. 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.

  19. 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.

  20. 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

  21. 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.)

  25. I am more focused on commercial sites which we definitely will not recommend url shortening process. However, i personally agree with you that it is important no to hide your url because they contain important info which might tell the user what page he will be encountering.

  28. @P.baker Hovering over your zenaddress does not show the real destination. Is that what you are suggesting? btw, zenaddress seems to be down…if a hover over preview is not possible then maybe the customize option at http://linkasa.com is the best. Does anyone know what the life of tinyurl, etc, urls are?

  29. I see that Zone Alarm (personal version) will jump in and stop access to the tinyurl website on the basis that “ZoneAlarm has found that http://tinyurl.com may be unsafe.This website has been known to distribute spyware.” I presume that this is because of the points raised by Scott – trouble is I would like to be able to access addresses using it when the address comes from a trusted and knowledgeable friend – but the free version of Zone Alarm does not allow changes to access to be changed – unless anyone here knows better!!

  30. If you use Firefox or Greasemonkey, there is an extension called LongURL (http://longurl.org/tools) that shows you the url of the page your tinyurl would redirect you to, just by putting your mouse over the link. Works with other services like bit.ly, etc.

    Eliminates the need for an extra click, gives you all the information of a human readable url, and still provides all the space saving attributes of a shortened url.

  32. I am more focused on commercial sites which we definitely will not recommend url shortening process. However, i personally agree with you that it is important no to hide your url because they contain important info which might tell the user what page he will be encountering.

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