i love, love, LOVE http://www.tinyurl.com

if you don’t know what it is, you should go there, and if you use firefox, you should grab this extension so that it’s even easier to make use of its brilliance every day.

the basic idea, for the uninitiated, is that they take a really really long url like: http://www.youwantsomethingeh.com/howaboutthis/
orthis/or29802-958-%0850050/orsomethingelse.html

and associates it with a really tiny url like this: http://www.tinyurl.com/uthl3

and then when you put in the tiny one, it looks up the long one for you, and sends you there.

so you don’t have to cut, paste, type, or otherwise associate with the long one.

which is very convenient, and makes you look magnum when you use it in emails and stuff because you don’t piss people off by pasting in things that break lines and get screwed up.

the only question that occurs to me about the whole business is that it seems like there are a lot of duplicates being made, because i’m pretty sure it generates a new tinyurl every time you tell it to, even if there’s already one out there, because it’s easier to do so than to look through all the existing ones to see if there’s a match.

that makes sense, really, and after all, they are TINY, so i don’t think there is really any reason to worry about taking up disk space.

but it still does make me wonder… at the very least about keeping track of the ones that i make myself, because i know for a fact that i have made more than one for the same url. it’s just impossible to remember something like http://www.tinyurl.com/oslt2d, and it would be silly to try, but i still feel a little… decadent, or something, when i know that i am populating their database with 14 links to a book on amazon or directions on google maps.

it doesn’t bother me that much, but it also makes me say, well, if there WAS an easy way to reduce the duplicates, there wouldn’t really be anything BAD about that, right?
and who knows?

does the fact that they’ve made one before dissuade Anyone from making a tinyurl again? because they have some idea that they should have kept track of the old one?

that would suck.

and DO they have any problems with disk space or clutter?  how many duplicates are there, really?
would there be peripheral benefits of a way to keep at least a personal history, if not a communal history?

like what if it was built into something like del.icio.us?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 5:18 pm and is filed under ideas, web commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.