WP-A: A New URL Shortener

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> There are many places where there are limits (hard or soft) on message
>> lengths. Some of us still use MUDs and 80-character line limits.
>> Business cards or other printed media need to be transcribed by hand.
>> Dictation of URLs becomes virtually impossible when they're
>> arbitrarily long.
>
>
> Your typical shortened URL made up of a random jumble
> of letters and numbers isn't good for dictating or
> transcribing from a business card either.
>
> For those uses, a well-chosen semantically-memorable
> URL is still the best solution. There shouldn't be
> too much trouble in arranging one of those that's
> short enough to put on a business card.

Quite a few URL shorteners allow you to pick a keyword (conditionally
on it not being in use, of course). For example,
http://bit.ly/threshvote is perfectly memorable, but is still shorter
than the address it redirects to. Given that it's a mobile app
download link, it's extremely helpful for people to be able to type
that without clicking on it; and since it's going to the Google Play
Store, the creator of the app has no power to shorten the official
URL.

In some cases, the correct solution would be a short URL at a domain
that the provider controls. But that's no different from running your
own shortener service - it still has the extra indirection and
consequent risks. So for a lot of people, a public shortener is just
as good.

ChrisA