Shortening
October 4th 2010 08:49
I used to use tinyurl to shorten URLS, but it was a bit fiddly copying the original URL and then opening up the tinyurl site and copying and pasting and so on. It was usually Twitter I was working with, and that meant still more pasting.
And then along came something called Add This - their slogan was Make Sharing Easy, and certainly it was a faster process than tinyurl's. With Add This you have yet another item on your tool bar (soon there'll be no room on the browser to see the sites) and when you want to make a shortened URL for Twitter or StumbleUpon or Digg, or some other site, you just open up the page in question, click on the little button at the top of the screen and away you go. Except with the Twitter part of the program it has to open another copy of Twitter every time, which always seems to me to be a bit of double-handling. If you do several of these in a row you can wind up with Twitter tabs all over your browser.
Now Google is getting in on the act, I see. I've just been checking the site and am a bit surprised to find you need to open up another tab on your browser to access the oddly named goo.gl. Certainly it shortens things down - even smaller than tinyurl. This one takes you to a recent post on another of my blogs, and is this long: http://goo.gl/3mC8. The equivalent on tinyurl is this long: http://tinyurl.com/2329h79 - seven figures after the tinyurl.com part of the address, compared to four on the Google version.
But how long will they be able to keep that up? I think even tinyurl has found that the more people use it the longer the url has to get, and no doubt Google will find this in time, too. Tinyurl used to use more letters than figures; I see that it's now having to revert to numbers. Plus tinyurl's base address is 11 figures long, including the dot. Google has managed to get this down to six in total, which is certainly an improvement.
Here, by way of further comparison, is the Add This version of the same address: http://bit.ly/9IIX2O. It gets down to six letters, and has the advantage over tinyurl of having a short home address, like Google's.
And then along came something called Add This - their slogan was Make Sharing Easy, and certainly it was a faster process than tinyurl's. With Add This you have yet another item on your tool bar (soon there'll be no room on the browser to see the sites) and when you want to make a shortened URL for Twitter or StumbleUpon or Digg, or some other site, you just open up the page in question, click on the little button at the top of the screen and away you go. Except with the Twitter part of the program it has to open another copy of Twitter every time, which always seems to me to be a bit of double-handling. If you do several of these in a row you can wind up with Twitter tabs all over your browser.
Now Google is getting in on the act, I see. I've just been checking the site and am a bit surprised to find you need to open up another tab on your browser to access the oddly named goo.gl. Certainly it shortens things down - even smaller than tinyurl. This one takes you to a recent post on another of my blogs, and is this long: http://goo.gl/3mC8. The equivalent on tinyurl is this long: http://tinyurl.com/2329h79 - seven figures after the tinyurl.com part of the address, compared to four on the Google version.
But how long will they be able to keep that up? I think even tinyurl has found that the more people use it the longer the url has to get, and no doubt Google will find this in time, too. Tinyurl used to use more letters than figures; I see that it's now having to revert to numbers. Plus tinyurl's base address is 11 figures long, including the dot. Google has managed to get this down to six in total, which is certainly an improvement.
Here, by way of further comparison, is the Add This version of the same address: http://bit.ly/9IIX2O. It gets down to six letters, and has the advantage over tinyurl of having a short home address, like Google's.
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