Posted on Tuesday 25 October 2005
I’ve seen TinyURL links before, but never really knew what they were all about until today. Have you ever emailed someone a link that has a rather long URL and their reader breaks the link over multiple lines? Then, you have to go through the whole process of trying to help them fix it so they can see the link.
Quite the pain. Enter TinyURL.com. Today I was working on a page on my academic site and wanted to use the following link:
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Discussion/
browse_thread/thread/304337eba04ec651/584d7f13d2ee8bb1?
lnk=st&q=thunderbird+csv+header&rnum=4&hl=en#584d7f13d2ee8bb1
Pretty ugly to work with, no? I used TinyURL and got the following link:
Pretty cool, huh?
Tags: Cool Sites, tinyurl
I give it a thumbs up, though I wish it were just easy to build it into everyday life without requiring a website to assist you. I mean, really, tinyurl could be badly abused and you’d never know (for example, with “phishing”).
I can’t believe you didn’t know about tinyurl before now. I’ve known about this little trick for ages. Bwahahaha, I finally knew something about computers before you did! Wahoo for me!
DC, yea, I was thinking about how it could be badly abused (like most useful things, I suppose). Once someone gets that link, there’s no way to tell what domain it’s coming from. I guess, like a lot of things, there’s some amount of trust involved. For example, if I sent you an email with a TinyURL link or placed on in my webpage, hopefully my reputation is such that it goes to where I say it goes and not some phishing or porn site. It would help if more sites started using mod_rewrite rules for links generated by queries.
Leigh Ann, you need to share your vast knowledge with me!
Sadly, I’ve gotten emails that claimed they were from one person but were actually from someone else. Let’s just hope that nobody that falls for an email virus has both of our email addresses in their addressbook.
Also, I always suspected that Leigh Ann was more computer-savvy than she lets on. I heard a rumor that she was actually a secret computer agent for a secret government organization but I never believed it – until now.