Dear Internets,

[markgritter]

What is the point of the tinyurl service?

Why should I click on some link whose destination you have purposefully obscured? Wouldn't that make me less likely to follow it

Comments

[markgritter]

I'm still not getting the story, though.

Suppose somebody gets a TinyURL from whatever source and actually visits the page. If he thinks it's cool and wants to share it with all his friends, the real URL is right there in the browser window and the TinyURL is not. Which is going to get copy + pasted into an email or blog post?

The TinyURL is marginally less likely to get broken in an email forward. I don't get many email forwards these days, I guess, so maybe that's more relevant than I appreciate.

[hypatia_j]

If one wanted to share something received as a tinyurl, wouldn't you forward/copy the tinyurl source rather than copying the full url from the browser window?

[songwind]

I think it's more for people who don't use good HTML and paste links into forum posts and stuff.

[gunga_galunga]

I love tinyurl. My default for email is plain text, so I don't do html tagging there and big ugly URLs can be a pain. They can get split up, especially in replies.

I almost never use if for LJ, however, just email.

[chrishartman]

I have to agree with some others here, tinyurls are invaluable in email. While _my_ email client does fine with long links, I get plenty sent to me that are already wrapped (and thus broken) by the sender's client. This isn't just forwarded email, simply any message that's sent to me. It's not "marginally less likely to be broken", it's 100% less likely for long links, from a good 20% (that's a guess) of people I correspond with. And rather than try to diagnose somebody else's broken mail sender, I just tell them to use tinyurl.

I agree 100% that it's useless for web pages.

[markgritter]

Isn't this the 21st century? Why can't we get email working correctly?

I want my NeXTmail back, dammit.

(I have a related problem at work, actually--- one person consistently mangles URLs in bug reports. Which is not even e-mail, it's bugzilla's description field. But it would never occur to me to ask that person to use TinyURL instead.)

[guppiecat]

If email were going to get fixed, it would be fixed by now. We have to conclude that the powers that be don't want it fixed.

In order to make HTML-enabled email function properly, we would have to have identical web rendering in all email clients. We can't even get Opera, IE, and Firefox to agree. Imagine the nightmare making it function in Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Evolution, pine, mutt, and gmail (multi-browsers again!).

And that's just the reading part. The sending/receiving part is FAR more complex and full of bigger problems.

No, we're stuck with it until a better technology comes along to replace it. I just hope that that tech is better designed than the mess we have today.

(I am an email admin by day, BTW :)

[laurel]

I see no reason to use them in blogs, but TinyURL and similar services are useful sometimes in email (if you're sending a long URL to someone who is not especially clueful about the net and might not have an email client that properly handles URLs).

I mostly encounter the service now on Twitter, where one's posts are limited to 140 characters. Then short URLs are necessary. I suppose some Tweets end up as blog posts and then would carry over the shortened URLs.