This Slashdot discussion got me started. Â The discussion is about URL shortening services and their impact on the Web. Â Needless to say, most people who care about the Web, hate all kinds of third-party URL manipulations with a passion. Â The reasons are numerous, and here are two that annoy me the most:
- Obscurity. Â You have no idea where you are going anymore. Â It can be the newest scam website, an image, a huge video, or anything else for that matter. Â When you see full URL, even if you don’t always can understand the full path, at least the domain name is a hint.
- Latency. Most (all?) URL shortening services work via a redirect. Â So whenever you click on the URL to visit a page, instead of going to the page directly you are going to the web service which expands that URL first, and then redirects you further. Â This takes time and gives you nothing in return.
A lot of Slashdot people feel similar. Â Yet it still makes for an interesting discussion. Â Here are the bits that I picked up:
- HugeUrl.com – web service that does the opposite of what URL shortening services do. Â It takes any URL and makes it huge. Â Just for the fun of it.
- ShadyUrl.com – web service that obscures given URLs, making them look very suspicious. Also, for the fun of it.
- There are a number of browser plugins that automate the expansion of short URLs, either on-demand or as you go. Â Here is one for Firefox. Â Here is one for Google Chrome.
- Last year’s Coding Horror blog post discussing the problems of URL shortening services.
Also after a brief discussion and fooling around with my colleagues, I learned about Abcd-Whatever, which is a web service that lives on an extremely long domain name and offers free email addresses. Â Such email addresses are hard for people to type correctly, impossible for some SPAM bots to grab, and excellent for testing web forms.