Making URLs Work
It all started innocently back in the early nineties. Sharing URLs was so easy, links typically maxed out around 15 characters and rarely had more than one directory of depth, unless you were in Academia. Then came web applications and the length of URLs skyrockets such that today, it’s not uncommon to have a generated URL with upwards of 200 characters. Copying and pasting is problematic as links frequently break on lines and become inaccurate and unusable. Forget about trying to type some of these in on a mobile device. See the full story after the jump
In order fix these giant strings of http code we began using a utility called tinyURL. tinyURL came on the scene around 2002 and since has since processed more than 100 million URLs. In the past year, dozens more URL shorteners or shortenizers have become popular.
Why shorten URLs?
Let’s say you’re shopping for the new version of the Adobe CS 4 suite at Amazon, and you need to share the link with co-workers. The raw link weighs in at 131 Characters.
More likely than not this link will break when sent via e-mail due to the because it cannot be expressed on a single line. Forget about trying to get this to work on a mobile device.
Using tinyURL the link is shortened to 25 characters, and will nicely fit on one line
Not only is it less than 1/3 the length of the original, this shorter won’t break in e-mail or in chat or text.
URL shorteners are also useful in print because they can take up less space, and be as specific as needed without the need to remember a long string of directories.
Examples
Here are some of our favorites that you can try to make it possible to reliably share URLs of any size. Try one of them next time you need to share link.
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