Comments on: Terror of tinyurl

By: Hoyus

Hoyus — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:44:58 +0000

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!!

By: boardtc

boardtc — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:42:23 +0000

@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?

By: Rick Lim

Rick Lim — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:34:19 +0000

Well, the preview feature of the tinyurl more or less helped some users.

By: P. Baker

P. Baker — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:24:58 +0000

There is a better alternative….

ZenAddress

They don’t hide the real URL so you know where you are really going. I only use ZenAddress and works fine on Twitter. ZenAddress is less cluttered and seems to work a lot faster too.

http://zenaddress.com//225f

By: Singapore SEO

Singapore SEO — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:57:31 +0000

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.

By: gilber

gilber — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:31:08 +0000

try this one , It has a default preview feature.

By: more tiny

more tiny — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:07:45 +0000

This is the shortest tiny url service I’ve ever seen:
http://3b8.cc/

By: Goliath

Goliath — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:16:45 +0000

You should take a look at http://www.linkasa.com, IMHO :p

By: Scott Rosenberg

Scott Rosenberg — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:55:00 +0000

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.)

By: David Bolton

David Bolton — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:55:55 +0000

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