URL Shortener tr.im To Go Community-Owned, Open Source 145
Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain. This comes after reports that the service may shut down and that they were entertaining offers from prospective buyers. From a post on the site's blog: "It is our hope that tr.im, being an excellent URL shortener in its own right, can now begin to stand in contrast to the closed twitter/bit.ly walled garden: it will become a completely open solution owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the entire community." They plan to complete the transition by September 15th, and the code will be released under the MIT license. In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."
URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links. The Idea was to save some bandwidth, but now it uses more because people are having to write scripts that allow mouseovers to see where the link actually goes which now just causes a few lookups of the same url to happen anyways per person rather than just sitting on a post somewhere.
In most cases the URL itself is less than 1% of the size of the content of a web page so exactly who or what they're saving is unclear.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:5, Informative)
Or, you can just use tinyurl. This gives someone the option to use the preview.tinyurl.com subdomain, which will put you on a landing page and not automatically redirect.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that they break the internet, but the 150 or whatever character limit in Twitter makes it necessary.
So blame Twitter it is their fault.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Twitter can fuck off
2. With a bit of sensible design, the sites can manage this functionality themselves.
Redirect short to long. No need for the tinyurl hack.
http://example.com/123 [example.com]
http://example.com/123/arguably-really-long-urls-stuffed-with-keywords-are-good-for-seo [example.com]
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some who call me... (Score:5, Funny)
t.im
?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, because thisisareallyreallyreallyfreakingdomainnamethatissouttterlydescriptive.com is really a popular site.
Give me a break and learn to copypaste.
Re: (Score:2)
A domain name doesn't need to be >70 characters in order to be long when compared to 5 characters.
You really have no idea what url shorteners are used for, do you?
Re: (Score:2)
I fail to see why, in absense of a 70 char (or otherwise absurdly long) URL, why it would be worth the effort and worth the obsfucation to use one.
You really don't know how to copypaste, do you?
Re: (Score:2)
I fail to see why, in absense of a 70 char (or otherwise absurdly long) URL, why it would be worth the effort and worth the obsfucation to use one.
You really don't know how to copypaste, do you?
I rest my case.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, superb point. You really excell at expressing your arguments in convincing ways.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed I do.
But the reason why I didn't do that here is because I detest stating the obvious and repeating things. The reason why url shorteners are used has been explained in this discussion by others, probably better than I would have. You, apparently, have not grasped this, and it is preventing you from understanding why a long domain name is detrimental to the proposed mechanism, why the domain name does not have to be even near 70 characters long in order to be considered too long for this purpose, and
Re: (Score:2)
Also stated above in the discussion are reasons why URL shorteners are overused, almost always abused, and in general a bad idea.
Apparently you are far too dense to understand, or even consider terribly simple concepts that do not align with your opinions.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand perfectly well that they're overused, almost always abused, and in general a bad idea. Personally, I never use them. But I also understand perfectly well why very a large amount of people simply wouldn't give a shit about that, even if they knew... which would make you the one not able to understand or even consider terribly simple concepts that do not align with your opinions.
A "short" url that isn't short enough would simply be put through an url shortener, meaning that you'd end up with an u
Re: (Score:2)
How would I paste that in IRC, IM, email, etc.?
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links
Just because some people abuse something doesn't mean that everyone does. I use tr.im all the time, and find it extremely useful, especially since it allows me to send the URL's straight to Twitter. tr.im URL's are only 17 characters long (ex. http://tr.im/aaaa [tr.im]) as opposed to tinyurl's 25 character minimum. When you only have 140 characters to work with, the extra 8 characters to spare can help a lot. I really can't figure out why anybody would use bit.ly or tinyurl over tr.im, at least for Twitter.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You could instead use a messaging service that allows you to write messages that are long enough to convey real meaning, and not have to worry about the length of your links.
Yeah but some times Twitter is extremely handy, and some times 140 characters is enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because you fail doesn't mean it's not useful.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Initially, URL shorteners were a solution to a problem nobody had. Fortunately, Twitter came along and created a problem!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
URL shorteners are amazing whenever you have to write down a URL by hand, or read a web address to someone over the phone, or copying it between two computers (maps-dot-google-dot-com-slash-fivethousandlinesoftypoinducinggibberish).
Re: (Score:2)
This.
Granted, in most cases, it should be reasonable to copy between two computers -- you're on a damn network (the Internet, if nothing else), so you should be able to use some sort of messaging service. You've got even less excuse if they're both your own computer -- I haven't tried in awhile, but surely someone picked up Google Browser Sync.
But sometimes, it is useful -- for example, on the phone, talking someone through installing an IM client so you can do this the normal way. That, or relaying links i
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
For one thing, they are saving a lot of space on IRC chat windows.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
"They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links."
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash? Ever tried to write it down? In that situation, I use tinyurl to change it to something like "tinyurl dot com slash slashdot no space trim". If URLs were human-readable, human-sharable references to documents like they were meant to be, services like tr.im wouldn't exist, but they do.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash?
"I'll e-mail you the address."
Re: (Score:2)
Not everyone who uses computers has email (or a cell phone for that matter.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they have a web browser, but not email, the first site you could send them to would be gmail dot com -- or, if you're security-conscious, h-t-t-p-s colon slash slash mail dot google dot com. It doesn't have to be email, either -- at that point, they'll also have a nice web-based chat client.
Re: (Score:2)
email isn't exactly great for timely delivery, some places have pretty slow email systems and then there is the issue of greylisting. Plus some peoples email addresses are almost as bad as a lot of urls.
IM can be an option but a lot of people are banned from using that at work.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Their email client mangled the url and they don't know how to play "turn this character soup back into a valid url".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you use HTML email and send it as a link.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash? Ever tried to write it down?
No.
Re: (Score:2)
Thankfully most people have figured out how to search google or within websites for meaningful keywords, instead of trying to verbally communicate URLs within a domain.
The only problem that tiny url services "solve" is twitter. And you're still left with a major problem: you use twitter.
Re:URL Shortners Are Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Idea was to save some bandwidth"
No. It wasn't, and that's a really daft suggestion because the short URL redirects you to the target url, so actually you're adding a tiny overhead.
They were created to turn extrmemly long links (eg. google maps with lon+lat+cruft in the querystring) into easy to remember and easy to transfer short links. A job they do very well.
Re: (Score:2)
No. It wasn't, and that's a really daft suggestion because the short URL redirects you to the target url, so actually you're adding a tiny overhead.
This is assuming that a page only contains one link. If a page contains a lot of links, but a typical user doesn't click on many (or any) then you can save a lot of bandwidth by shortening the URLs and then add a small amount of overhead for each one they click on (which the user pays, not you).
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links.
I get around this by using the TinyURL Decoder [userscripts.org] script for Greasemonkey. It's explicitly designed to dynamically change shortened links back to the full-length originals, telling you exactly where they go without you having to visit the page itself.
There are only two disadvantages I've found. First, there is a marked delay before it actually decodes the URL, but that's unavoidable. I found the second when visiting the Katawa Shoujo Dev Blog [blogspot.com]. It seems for reasons related to limitations of Blogspot the link to
Re: (Score:2)
I thought it was to make URLs easier to read or pass around. Didn't tinyurl exist before twitter?
Which would you rather give someone over the telephone:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=Pier+5,+San+Francisco,+California+94111&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.527387,65.830078&ie=UTF8&cd=2&geocode=FcvBQAIdZmG0-A&split=0&ll=37.800239,-122.396085&spn=0.007918,0.016072&t=h&z=16&iwloc=A [google.com]
OR:
http://tinyurl.com/m [tinyurl.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
URL Shortners Are Bad....They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links.
And in other news, GOTO's considered harmful?
Re: (Score:2)
Agree wholeheartedly. I am incredibly wary of any shortened URLs.
I know what with Twitter and all they may be important to some, but I see them more and more used in forums and message boards. Why use a shortened url when posting from a computer? Is it really harder to (ctrl+c ctrl+v) a full url than to ctrl+c, open a new tab, type tinyurl.com (or click a bookmark), ctrl+v, click "make tinyurl", highlight the new URL, ctrl+c again, and finally ctrl+v it into the post? Seems like more work to me.
My AV protec
Re: (Score:2)
I only use them to distribute long URLs by e-mail since some popular e-mail/web-mail clients (still!) break long URLs by wrapping them funny.
Re: (Score:2)
OK, I run a (small) URL shortening site: http://shortify.com/ [shortify.com]
You're wrong on several counts. First, URL shorterners were never designed to save bandwidth. The whole idea is absurd, since you're introducing (at least) several hundred bytes of HTTP headers for the 302 redirect every time someone clicks a link.
Second, abuse is certainly an issue that I deal with. But it's perfectly managable. Spammers submit a lot of links, because many of them stop working once the message boards they've spammed take their po
Re: (Score:2)
Case in point:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002DHLV8S/ref=s9_simz_gw_s8_p65_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=10Y89T4V261QMCTNJ4VJ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846
Oh, sure. I can make a link [amazon.com] out of it, which works fine on a web forum, but does not fucking work on a telephone or a newletter or a postcard or...
"Yeah, Jeff. Amazon's taking preorders on Windows 7. Can you believe how much they want for that shit? No, really: Just go to double-yoo-double-y
Re: (Score:2)
are there any URL shorteners that only use lower case letters and numbers? It would make the shortened urls a little bit longer but MUCH easier to read out.
Re: (Score:2)
Hear, hear.
I second the motion.
(And, no, I don't know of any.)
Adding an extra letter (or two) and turning things lower case (or, better, case-insensitive) would be an absolute fucking boon for brevity and verbal communication of Web things.
Re: (Score:2)
I never thought it had to do with bandwidth. I saw URL shorteners become popular shortly after everyone started putting the title of the page into the URL for search engine optimization. It used to be that anyone's blog post would be like http://example.com/blog/2009/09/19 [example.com] or http://example.com/blog.php?story=urls [example.com] but now it's like http://example.org/blog/2009/08/19/why-url-shorteners-are-not-a-good-idea [example.org] . Even Slashdot went this route--one of the URLs for this story is http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/ [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Additionally, they are useful anywhere a huge URL looks out of place - Email conversations, in-line
Re: (Score:2)
No, the idea was to shorten URLs that are too long to properly represent without corruption in things like email (though I always thought you just put around the URL and a parser would later properly reconstruct a multi-line URL). Use in HTML is absolutely stupid, as a long URL can be linked with no problem in HTML.
Really? (Score:2)
I mean I like OSS and all, but I wrote my own redirected for my domain it can't be more than 30 lines of PHP
http://example.com/index.php?url=http://example.org/long+url/
SQL lookup, return the url if it exists, increment last number if it doesn't. Return: http://example.org/10/ [example.org]
Mod Rewrite to assist in the redirect and tada.
Added benefit of not scaring off friends with an odd domain.
Re: (Score:2)
For their next attention-getting trick, they are going to open source Hello World.
Re: (Score:2)
For their next attention-getting trick, they are going to open source Hello World.
No need [gnu.org].
Re: (Score:2)
But that's GPLed. I disagree with the GPL on [insert random reason here] grounds. If only they'd used the BSD license then I could take all of their work and incorporate it in to [insert proprietary program here] without having to pay anything back to the community. ;)
open URL shorteners? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they are going open. How is this going to solve issues that make shorteners evil ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil/ [techcrunch.com] )?
transparency loss (great, there is db that can resolve links. Are browsers supposed to querry 'shortener like' urls and display proper ones?)
rot & reliability loss (tr.im claims they will be forever open and totally not sell domain to highest bidder and whatnot, but domain is still weakest link - it goes broken and tons of links get broken too)
pointless proxy (great, so it is now pointless 'open' proxy. yay).
Re: (Score:2)
Standards for defining "evil" have slipped in the past few years, I see.
If they're "going open" then I'd say that it's a good start on an open "shortened URL" standard that could, some day, solve those issues while providing a similar function. I can see the use for such a system, if only to provide a way to share links away from a computer, and I'll take short URLs over 2D codes any day.
Re: (Score:2)
But he said it, and it is now reported on the Internet, so surely it must be true? How can anyone have ever said anything that was then reported on the Internet that wasn't true or that they knew couldn't last? I'm sure that if he does move ownership of the domain to a company or organisation then that company would never sell o
Re: (Score:2)
Slow news day? (Score:3, Funny)
Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain.
So?
Re: (Score:2)
Newsflash: Dying Service Fails To Sell Itself, Gives Itself Away.
-yawn-
"MIT license" != "public domain" (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm being too literal here, but MIT-licensed source code is not in the public domain.
Re: (Score:2)
begin its migration into the public domain
Though I can't see why they need an intermediate step at "open source" between "proprietary" and "public domain".
rel=shortlink could eradicate URL shorteners (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had a beef with URL shorteners for a long while now for reasons that have been covered ad nauseam (not the least of which being that in addition to adding significant overhead [techcrunch.com] - typically hundreds of milliseconds per request - they are just plain evil [techcrunch.com]). IMO the best solution is to let webmasters create and advertise their own short links using the "shortlink" link relation (e.g. rel="shortlink" in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD) such that they can be auto-detected by clients who then no longer need to generate their own using 3rd party services. I wrote the shortlink specification [purl.org] a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback. The standard got a big shot in the arm last week when WordPress.com announced support for rel=shortlink [wordpress.com] on over 100 million pages. I've since requested support be introduced into the top 20 Twitter clients (representing over 80% of Twitter usage) and have had only positive feedback so far. A number of other high profile sites like PHP.net and Ars Technica have also jumped on board. Anyway if you, like me, are sick of URL shorteners then you're welcome to give me a hand making them go away...
Sam
Re: (Score:2)
I wrote the shortlink specification [purl.org] a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback.
So, are you going to just put it on a random website out there or are you going to do the proper thing and get it on a standards track somewhere? (Maybe IETF or W3C.) That's the only way to get it really trusted by the bulk of users, since they trust those organizations to keep on what they've been doing for years.
Re:rel=shortlink could eradicate URL shorteners (Score:4, Insightful)
Shortlink is a good idea for what it does - but it still puts the onus on the web site owner to create and permanently save a shortlink for every piece of content that can differ based on "get" parameters. When you're a google, that's a lot of latitudes and longitudes to have to retain forever.
The only argument I've heard against shorteners so far boils down to "but people can misuse it!" -- which in the end boils down to "this is For Your Own Good". Never something I've been particularly fond of - especially on the Internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In order to provide a shortlink as described, every set of unique directions requested consisting of 2..n coordinates must be perpetually mapped to a shortlink that can be accessed directly for all time.
To make the same point using a di
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, see, you had me in total agreement until I noticed that your source material was a pair of TechCrunch articles.
Firefox crawling to a halt on tr.im? (Score:2)
I just tried submitting a URL to tr.im and after doing so my browser bogged down and slowed to a crawl. My CPU usage jumps to 50% (so 100% of one of the two cores I have) and my whole system becomes ill-responsive. Meanwhile the "answer" section of tr.im is "fading in".
so cute (Score:3, Funny)
Not nesc evil (Score:2)
Actually, I am thinking of creating a URL shortener inside my intranet. Here's a purpose that no one's thought of, or at least mentioned: it gives a layer of abstraction. Inside the company they can send emails, or put links on web pages that point to my URL shortener, let's say, "Company Policies". That link will always work no matter if the target web page stays on our legacy ASP system or gets moved to our shiny new Sharepoint. All they have to do to fix thousands of links is update the target in the
Tubegirl and goatse (Score:2)
The Solution: (Score:2)
http://hugeurl.com/ [hugeurl.com]
Walled garden? (Score:2)
I'm sorry...
Twitter is a walled garden. To @reply someone, you have to go through Twitter.
Facebook is even more of a walled garden. There's a large number of things you can only do with other people on facebook, once you have a facebook account. And, facebook may keep your data forever.
But URL shorteners? I'm all for making things open source and interoperable, but all this does is make a long URL into a short one. What would opening it up accomplish compared to, say, making Facebook work with OpenID and XF
Re: (Score:2)
Even if you don't take Twitter into account, IMHO there's already enough problems with dead links everywhere. When (not if) those URL shortener services go off-line, say hello to millions upon millions of dead links that go nowhere.
Re:.im Isle of Man (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."
Am I the only one who this sounds scary? Open source is great, but open data like that not. I sure as hell wont be using tr.im to shorten my urls if they intend to make it all public. When I use tinyurl and such I kind of can know that all the destination urls wont be open data to everyone. Yeah, I know you shouldn't paste personals url via other sites, but people still do. Some privacy, please?
Re: (Score:2)
When I use tinyurl and such I kind of can know that all the destination urls wont be open data to everyone. Yeah, I know you shouldn't paste personals url via other sites, but people still do. Some privacy, please?
Go read Tiny URL's privacy policy [www.tiny.cc]. Go ahead, I'll still be here when you get back.
Read it? Great! Now show me where it said they won't display a list of links to anyone who asks.
Think about this for a minute. What information could anyone glean from knowing that a particular URL has been mapped, especially since you don't have to use an account to create the shortened URL so there's no way of showing who originally created it? Also, given that a given shortened URL is trivially resolvable to the origin
Re: (Score:2)
Think about this for a minute. What information could anyone glean from knowing that a particular URL has been mapped, especially since you don't have to use an account to create the shortened URL so there's no way of showing who originally created it? Also, given that a given shortened URL is trivially resolvable to the original address, what privacy did you incorrectly think it was granting you?
What about if you linked to your private pictures? Or maybe something even more personal. Such can give out lots of personal privacy info to everyone, and I dont really agree with that. Even if its the open source way to go. People use these services to short url links they give to people they know; they sure as hell shouldn't be available to everyone.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What about if you linked to your private pictures?
What are you doing with those links? If you're sending them via email, why not send the whole link? If you're posting them to Twitter or Facebook, then they're effectively public anyway and anyone could see your private pictures just by clinking the shortened links. It's not like they're password protected.
Help me understand this. What's a plausible use case where a shortened URL could potentially increase privacy?
Re: (Score:2)
I understand your point, and I know this very well aswell. But my point is that "normal users" aren't going to see it, but just trust these short url services and then they spread those links to everyone who want to see them. I would never use these for giving personal stuff to friends, but people who dont know that good about the issues do - which is what i'm worried about.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Secondarily I'm a little confused as to what you're replying to, since this has nothing to do with the GP post, but that's a whole separate issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, you can get the specific url from tinyurl. But thats not the point. If you have free access to the complete database *without knowing the url*, its gonna break privacy. People use these services to post personal images/information with short urls, and they shouldn't be available for everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Step 1 (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Stop telling the Isle of Man what to do with their TLD.
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter restricts its message size because SMS messages limit their message size to 140 characters. So it is restricted for a reason.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Oh I entirely understand the absurd niche that it started through. However not only do most people use Twitter through mechanisms not at all bound by the SMS limit, are we to believe that someone posting a tweet from SMS first went to a URL shortener on their mobile device, got a shortened URL, and tweeted that? It doesn't happen.
URL shortening + SMS = a ridiculous combination.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, but I never made that claim.
I don't think so. Presumably, the reason URL shorteners exist is because there are some things that can't handle long URLs well. As I stated elsewhere, broken e-mail clients that wrap long URLs funny was the raison d'etre for URL-shorteners. However, since SMS also can't han
Re: (Score:2)