Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Trafigura debacle highlights inobvious URL-shortener problem #stopshortening

It’s not that bit.ly, tinyurl, tr.im or is.gd are *dying* you understand… although some people have reported that.

The issue is that with the Trafigura and Carter-Ruck debacle generating multiple tweets per second, it shows up an issue which otherwise stays below the radar of annoyance:

WHEN URL-SHORTENERS ARE USED EVERYWHERE IN A DISCUSSION, YOU CANNOT REMEMBER OR TELL WHICH LINKS YOU HAVE ALREADY VISITED

Really, folks: use shorteners with discretion, or ideally not at all. They hamper discussion.

⊞

Comments

2 responses to “Trafigura debacle highlights inobvious URL-shortener problem #stopshortening”

  1. Clive

    Maybe shortening services should agree on a standard format for a hash of the original URL which could be included in the shortened URL, then browsers could recognise this annotation and use it in “already-visited” determinations.

    Or, even simpler, there could be a standard way of indicating that a URL is shortened and the browser could do a first-stage redirect in the background to see if it’s already been visited.

    Indeed, given how obvious shortened URLs are to the human eye, perhaps a heuristic could be constructed. Then the problem’s entirely client-side.

    Reply
  2. Valerie Fenwick

    Twitter shortens your URLs for you. Even when it doesn’t replace it with bit.ly or something like that. For example, your URL for this tweet pointing to this blog post was: “http://www.crypticide.com/d…” 🙁

    Reply

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