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i’m writing this in w.bloggar — i’ve not used this desktop blogging tool before, so i hope it works. . .
i conducted a completely non-scientific test here. i simply wanted to know, given two popular url-snippers, which one returned a shorter url. the real question, is this: is url-snipping good for the web. i’ll discuss that question after we find out who is shorter.
i went to yahoo! maps and obtained directions for the following locations:
* ottawa, canada TO san diego, california (134 characters)
http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/index.php#maxp=location
&q2=+san+diego,+ca&q1=+ottawa&trf=0&mvt=m&lon =-96.328125&lat=39.0618492377634&mag=14
below are the respective results for tiny and snip:
http://tinyurl.com/qc5qt
http://snipurl.com/pjfv
* miami, florida TO seattle, washington (126 characters)
http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/#maxp=location&q2=seattle,
+wa&q1=miami,+florida&mvt=m&trf=0&lon=-101.25&lat=
36.7740925809329&mag=14
the results are below:
http://tinyurl.com/qkckk
http://snipurl.com/pjg3
the winner: snipurl
okay, the sample size was 2, with probably a low confidence level. this was just fun. the real question is whether or not url-snippers are good for the web. let’s back up a little bit and ask a foundational question: what is a url and what are they good for?
url stands for uniform (universal) resource locator. it refers to a resource on the web and is described by the location. it’s essentially an address, such as 1254 mountain view, california. since it is an address, they are meant to be descriptive, at least in theory. over the years, as fileystsem architecture becomes more nested, then the url gets longer and longer as it references resources in the local filesystem, traversing the path: the url recursively points to the resource it needs or references it in the fileysystem. as a consequence, url’s can get very complex and, hence, url’s can and have become very long as i show with the examples above.
a remedy for long and undescriptive url’s are services such as tinyurl and snipurl. opponents against these services claim that url’s then become opaque, masking the ultimate destination, and could and does lead the user to the wrong locations or even malware. this is true.
so how do we reconcile the dilemma between url’s that no longer fulfill descriptivity — the spirit of the url? answer: trust. yep, good ‘ol trust. if you are at a site that you have grown to trust because of content or past and good experiences with it, then most likely the links and the url’s that are there ought to be trustworthy also. if those url’s are converted by using a url-snipper service, then trust ought to bring one to click on a link; if no trust is present, then the user can choose not to link.
much simpler said than done and not much was solved with this discussion. instead, more questions are raised such as the following:
* regarding search engine optimization and backlinks, what if the backlink was snipped — would it be an effective backlink then?
* (not a question, but a statement) regarding security, i can see hackers creating a trojan horse that would be released and replace honest url’s with snipped ones with mal-destinations.
* others. . .
for more information, below are a list of snipper services:
* digbig
* doiop
* tinyurl
* snipurl
* elfurl
* goonlink
there are many others. do you prefer snipping ‘em or leaving ‘em long?
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
I prefer snipping, but the risk of a URL redirect to a bad site is real. I would trust TinyURL over the others. (I think it’s older).
All the scammers out there might have more success with snipping instead of having their phishing urls say something like…http://234.433.22.5/citibank. Not that I want them to be any more successful
With your test to see what service offered the shorter URL, it seems that the services are just using an associative array to find a key/value pair. So, the length of the target URL is not a determining factor. Since the short URL looks like it’s the key and the target URL is the value, the length is most likely determined by how many total key/value pairs the service has mapped.
Just my 2 cents.
In regards to what Gabriel mentioned, when I first read this I immediately thought that TinyURL had been around longer (purely a guess, only because I had never heard of SnipURL), and therefore would have a lot more URL’s floating around the internet. Kind of like California using 7 letters/numbers for their license plates as opposed to other states with 6.
Any URI shortening “service” is a bad idea because they all introduce potential hassles that far outweigh whatever benefits may accrue from their use. We don’t need intermediaries in between you and the site you’re linking to. When the service dies, its database of IDs can die with it and if that happens, all of the shortened links you used become useless. Few people take care to preserve old URIs when they change their website, bad URIs are already a problem. We should not seek ways to worsen this problem by introducing additional opportunities for bad URIs to come up.
Also, indirectly linking to one’s intended destination site increases the opportunity for tracking. Most web surfers probably don’t know of or turn off generating a referral header which, for those of you who don’t know, allows those who can access your logs to track what URI you used to get to a page hosted on that server. I’m guessing that if more users knew what was possible by sharing log data, they’d work to make their browsing less trackable.
I prefer to snip, but its good to be able to preview the link to see where it will take you. I like http://nutshellurl.com
Both Tinyurl and Snipurl allow you to preview your short URLs before you visit them.
Tinyurl and Snipurl are both roughly equally old. Both circa 2001, I think. Makeashortlerlink.com was the original idea, but horrid in its implementation. Tinyurl was the straight knock-off and didn’t add much other than being a shorter URL in itself.
Snipurl was the only one, and is perhaps the only one, that offers so many features –
1. The ability to have a nickname to the snipping. E.g.
http://tinyurl.com/xa11
http://snipr.com/unitedeqm
(They’re both the same URL. Which one looks nicer?)
2. Previewing
3. Private snippings.
4. Much better spam control than TInyurl (which is why Tiny is blocked by ISPs in many Asian countries)– btw, the guy who runs Snipurl is very responsive and is apparently adding features to the site, which I think are supercool.
5. Much better ability to manage your snippings (which means I can go in and change the 404s, so the URLs I had shared don’t go dead)
6. The ability to share my snippings as RSS, which I can share with people..
7. The ability to manage them in Excel files (http://snipr.com/site/help?go=excel)
8. The ability to add titles to them and search through all my snips
9. The ability to popup a window, copy the snipping, and auto-close it..
….and so forth. Btw, Snipurl also allows you to use snipr.com or snurl.com for even shorter URLs, although that matters very little to me. I do like Snipr.com though: http://snipr.com/site/profile
I don’t know why one would use Tinyurl…perhaps because it looks simple?
Try http://jumptomap.com/ to make URLs specific to addresses and map sites. It tries to make the URL very human-readable, though not necessarily very short.
I don’t like the design of tinyurl. Of course it has nothing to do with the service itself.
btw: A few weeks ago I found YATUC. Yatuc.com is also a new (?) free redirection serivce. It’s very fast and has a lot of nice features and very short links.
Jumping in a bit too late, but my 2 cents:
TinyURL is no more secure than other shorteners. Previewing helps mitigate risk, but it’s not fool-proof (many ways work around previews — perhaps with another snipped URL?)
Been using TinyURL though until I found a shorter (perhaps new?) service (http://elurl.com).
Anyway, keep your computers safe — preview or not!
Of course you do know snipurl offers http://sn.im right?
Tinyurl is much better. It allows you to “preview” a link. It will tell you where it links, instead of directly taking you there, so you know what you’re going to.
Sarah, are you sure Tinyurl is “much better” because of that piddly little feature? A bit like this you mean: http://peek.snipurl.com/smartercity ?
Snipurl has counteless other features compared to the tinyurl. Spend some time on the site because making silly pronouncements in public.
Btw, you can also see Snipurls with sn.im, for example:
http://peek.sn.im/smartercity