Short URLs – are they evil?
Since I began using Twitter, I have loved the shortened URL. It allows me to stay within Twitter’s 140-character-limit when I want to link to something. And I like to link to things.
Two recent events have me reconsidering.
The first is Digg’s introduction of the Digg bar, which threatens to bring shortened URLs into mainstream browsing. This has set-off a number of old-standing complaints about URL shortening, which can be briefly summarized as making the Internet less transparent and introducing centralized points of failure. There are also concerns about having search engines function properly when links are sent via third parties.
The first complaint was moot when dealing with Twitter — I have chosen who to follow, and on that basis I trust what they are linking me to. The latter two were unfortunate trade-offs that were made up for by Twitter’s utility.
But Digg is not Twitter — there is no essential need to keep that URL short in Digg that I can see. Digg is merely trying to gain a share of the URL-shortened traffic by embedding it into their new tool. An understandable strategy, but not one that I like.
This broadening of shortened URLs into a larger context has me reconsidering my own use of them, and wondering why we really need them in the first place. It seems strange to me that the benefits of URL shortening cannot be achieved in a way that eliminates (or minimizes) the process’s negative impacts. My suspicion is that this means that nobody has really tried.
The second recent event is the so-called Stalk Daily worm on Twitter. (It is so-called, because it appears that the Stalk Daily website had nothing to do with it.) While it was not actually how the worm spread, initial belief was that links to the Stalk Daily website could infect your account.
With shortened URLs and possibly infected Twitter contacts, suddenly every shortened link was suspect. Twitter was no longer safe. One Twitter contact who links frequently went on ignore for the day — particularly in his Tweets about the Stalk Daily problem. I could not identify whether or not any of the links were safe.
Which is how I have come to the conclusion that shortened links need to go. They are problematic and dangerous — but some of my favourite web tools require their use. A conundrum, but one for which a solution must be out there.
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Shortened URLs are the best thing ever. They make the success rate of rickrolls much higher.
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