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Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture?
Indus Khaitan writes "Thanks to twitter, SMS, and mobile web, a lot of people are using the url minimizers like tinyurl.com, urltea.com. However, now I see a lot of people using it on their regular webpages. This could be a big problem if billions of different links are unreachable at a given time. What if a service starts sending a pop-up ad along with the redirect. What if the masked target links to a page with an exploit instead of linking to the new photos of Jessica Alba. Are services like tinyurl, urltea etc. taking the WWW towards a single point of failure? Is it a huge step backward? Or I'm just crying wolf here?"
http://tinyurl.com/preview.php I've had it turned on since the days of people hiding goatse.cx behind TinyURLs.
Nobody knows how long exactly the service is made available. Please do some long-term thinking before using this, esp. in public forums. More than once, I couldn't follow those stupid mini URLs for whatever reason. They're just bad. More criticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL#Criticism.
The web is made of trillions of dead links right now. As it is I have to change some bookmarks because the authors have changed their websites and don't allow linking to certain sections. Whole websites go offline. Domain names expire. forums change. Even if it is nothing more than on a new server, Data is constantly moving on the internet.
If you expect all information to stay exactly where it was 5 years ago then you have misunderstood the web.
Mod me down if you wish, but if you can't tell the difference then you will never know the difference.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
A Firefox plugin that recognises a TinyURL (etc) and then uses a popup to identify in a tooltip the actual URL and title of the webpage. - ~~~~
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Do URL shrinkers make matters worse? Maybe. But on the other side the web has always been a single-point-of-failure architecture. If the webserver hosting your content is down, your content is no longer reachable on the net. Things get worse when you only have only a few webserver/provider that are hosting stuff, youtube, facebook, myspace and friends host a ton of content, if they ever go down, you lose a whole bunch of content. Sure, they have plenty of redundancy and are pretty stable so its unlikely to happen for longer periods of time. But you still hand over a hell of a lot of control to a tiny few companies.
Solution? Turn the web into something where you refer to content instead of servers. Request documents by their MD5/SHA1/whatever checksum and whatever server has that piece of content sends it to you. You no longer have a single point of failure. Freenet, Bittorrent and a bunch of other P2P tools are already doing it in one way or another, because it is simply a more failsafe and faster way to handle content distribution. The days where everybody had his own little webserver are long over and it might be time to start addressing this issue on a big scale.
Who are the primary users of tinyurl.com? Professionals? Corporations? No. Generally, it's a userbase very similar to the MySpace, YouTube, chat, and fan site userbases, and the world will not end if those links are broken. Well, except maybe for some nerds waiting in anticipation for the next batch of Britney Spears beach pics.
OK. So what if a corporation or government office is using tinyurl? Fire the IT staff. Do it now.
Last point. If you have a web host and you control the domain (or the path on the domain), it's rather easy to simulate tinurl. Example:
www.blahblahblah123.com/orders/products/listing/1/AYZHEKF/view.cgi?blah=blah&blah=blah&blah=blah&blah=blah.....
map to
www.blahblahblah123.com/1
use an Apache redirect, document.location = $url, or meta-refresh tag.
Camping on quad since 1996.
I think people are forgetting about printed computer magazines - e.g. Linux Journal, APC, etc. They have a restricted column magazine format, and they often use TinyURLs when publishing links.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's 281,474,976,710,656 different unique names that can point to somewhere on the web. Even if each eight-character shrunken name was assigned permanently then it is difficult to see how you could ever run out of names.
Did someone say that running out of names was a likely problem? Why did you even raise that issue?
So in short the answer is that these name shortening services are not going to damage the web - provided the links they provide are permanent
Let me rephrase that: "in short, the straw man problem I raised is not really a problem. There is no problem except perhaps for the real problem." Yes: the permanence of the link IS the issue raised by the summary above. What if these sites go down? What if they change their behaviour? What QOS have the people creating these links contracted for?Another thing to chew on is what service does Google provide? To me, it's the ultimate URL shrinker. I remember one domain, www.google.com, and then from there I can go to anywhere else through a search-able database of links.
Yes but: if there exists another search engine with the same features and a similar algorithm to Google's, it can be used as a stand-in. But if I build a new URL shortening service and put it on a different domain, it is completely useless for interpreting pre-existing tiny URLs, because it lacks the database mapping hash keys to URLs.Has Google damaged the web? I think the benefits out-weigh the problems. Search Engine Optimisation firms are damaging the semantics of the web in reaction to the power of the search engine but there can be no doubt that far more sites get exposure because of search engines than without them. On the whole, I'm willing to deal with Google spammers because the quality of the links is still high in-spite of them.
Now we're bringing search engine optimization into it. What's that got to do with the topic at hand???
URL shrinking services are the same. They have benefits and drawbacks. If you're listening to web-radio, it's far easier to give a shrunken URL which your listeners can jot down in a few seconds than spend thirty-seconds on a much larger URL.
Thanks doctor obvious. Yes, URL shrinking services have strengths and weaknesses. Like gasoline. And t-shirts. Let's discuss them instead of going off on tangents about SEO and hash space sizes.
The drawback is that the URL has no semantic meaning. I personally think the semantic meaning is less important than getting the URL out there.
This is a drawback for the user, but has nothing to do with net architecture. Please read the short summary above and discuss the topic at hand!
That is what he is talking about, NOT urls you get from verbal sources, presumably the verbol source for a shortened url would make sure that that url is valid when it is broadcast.
He is talking about links that are on the web itself, where there is ZERO need to make a url short. Your browser doesn't care how long the url is in the link you click on and for the poster there is an extra step involved in creating the short url so why bother?
tinyurl is a tool but some tend to use tools to fix problems that don't need fixing. If you build your website out of tinyurl links you got issues. It is not how the net is supposed to work.
Take slashdot, why on earth should the links in a story go via tinyurl? It creates extra data, it stops people from inspecting the url at a glance and for what?
The web already breaks down because so many sites keep changing the way their pages are organised so that old links don't work anymore. Try finding stuff that is a couple of years old, you start running headlong into the dead link mess. Not because the site itself is gone, but the site no longer can handle the requested url.
Why add another layer of complexity?
Use shortened urls when you got to give them verbally, but if the url is distruted across the net in the first place, what on earth is the point of shortening it?
Remember, if everyone uses tinyurl, all that needs to happen is that these servers go down for some reason and BOOM, there goes the internet.
Very smart people went out of their way to make DNS truly robuust and host multiple servers around the world to make sure the internet works, and then some idiots think that they should add another unneeded layer on top run by a tiny company?
Oh and another thing, most radio shows simply tell people to go to their own site and then click on the second story to get a url out there. What is an easier url Myradio.com read the second story OR tinyurl.com/3yaodz The myradio url will have been broadcasted countless times already as parts of the promo, in the case of webradio it is how you found the bloody radio in the first place.
With tinyurl you have to introduce a completly new url followed by a meaningless string. Yup, that is much easier.
No, the tool has its uses, but just because you got a hammer does not mean everything becomes a nail.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
To borrow a term from one of the fine America-loving comments on that bulletin board, I think it would be appropriate to call "TinyURL" type services "Pixie Servers".
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Camping on quad since 1996.
You didn't even read the summary, did you? The issue is that services such as TinyURL might start doing bad things, such as pop-ups, malware, and so on, or that they might be taken offline for a bit, causing many links to stop working properly. Who cares if there is a preview option when the service itself is compromised?
Everything is subjective.