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URL Shortener tr.im To Go Community-Owned, Open Source
Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain. This comes after reports that the service may shut down and that they were entertaining offers from prospective buyers. From a post on the site's blog: "It is our hope that tr.im, being an excellent URL shortener in its own right, can now begin to stand in contrast to the closed twitter/bit.ly walled garden: it will become a completely open solution owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the entire community." They plan to complete the transition by September 15th, and the code will be released under the MIT license. In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."
Stop abusing the Isle of Man's domain. If you don't have legitimate business in a country, don't claim that you do with our domain.
I could go for some community trim. Bring back free love and all that.
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links. The Idea was to save some bandwidth, but now it uses more because people are having to write scripts that allow mouseovers to see where the link actually goes which now just causes a few lookups of the same url to happen anyways per person rather than just sitting on a post somewhere.
In most cases the URL itself is less than 1% of the size of the content of a web page so exactly who or what they're saving is unclear.
I mean I like OSS and all, but I wrote my own redirected for my domain it can't be more than 30 lines of PHP
http://example.com/index.php?url=http://example.org/long+url/
SQL lookup, return the url if it exists, increment last number if it doesn't. Return: http://example.org/10/
Mod Rewrite to assist in the redirect and tada.
Added benefit of not scaring off friends with an odd domain.
So, they are going open. How is this going to solve issues that make shorteners evil ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil/ )?
transparency loss (great, there is db that can resolve links. Are browsers supposed to querry 'shortener like' urls and display proper ones?)
rot & reliability loss (tr.im claims they will be forever open and totally not sell domain to highest bidder and whatnot, but domain is still weakest link - it goes broken and tons of links get broken too)
pointless proxy (great, so it is now pointless 'open' proxy. yay).
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Isle of Man An island in the British Isles that is self-governed, officially not part of the UK, but is dependent and the responsibility of the Crown.
Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain.
So?
Life is about being a Phoenix!
http://code.google.com/p/phurl/
I used to live there it is a Protectorate of The Crown pretty much like Jersey, Guernsey & Gibraltar except the weather is not as good
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."
Am I the only one who this sounds scary? Open source is great, but open data like that not. I sure as hell wont be using tr.im to shorten my urls if they intend to make it all public. When I use tinyurl and such I kind of can know that all the destination urls wont be open data to everyone. Yeah, I know you shouldn't paste personals url via other sites, but people still do. Some privacy, please?
Maybe I'm being too literal here, but MIT-licensed source code is not in the public domain.
It's yet another shortening service, among a field of hundreds, few of which have any legitimate reason for existing beyond shock-links. They cried like little children because Twitter (a dumb, artificially restricted service) had a "preferred" service, so after stomping their feet for a while, pulling a little tantrum (did they *really* think there was a business model behind this garbage?) they then came back with this "we'll show them!" response. Cheap.
Why do they keep getting this attention?
I've had a beef with URL shorteners for a long while now for reasons that have been covered ad nauseam (not the least of which being that in addition to adding significant overhead - typically hundreds of milliseconds per request - they are just plain evil). IMO the best solution is to let webmasters create and advertise their own short links using the "shortlink" link relation (e.g. rel="shortlink" in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD) such that they can be auto-detected by clients who then no longer need to generate their own using 3rd party services. I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback. The standard got a big shot in the arm last week when WordPress.com announced support for rel=shortlink on over 100 million pages. I've since requested support be introduced into the top 20 Twitter clients (representing over 80% of Twitter usage) and have had only positive feedback so far. A number of other high profile sites like PHP.net and Ars Technica have also jumped on board. Anyway if you, like me, are sick of URL shorteners then you're welcome to give me a hand making them go away...
Sam
I just tried submitting a URL to tr.im and after doing so my browser bogged down and slowed to a crawl. My CPU usage jumps to 50% (so 100% of one of the two cores I have) and my whole system becomes ill-responsive. Meanwhile the "answer" section of tr.im is "fading in". So the problem seems to have something to do with opacity in HTML rendering.
Slashdot crowd: please help me... is anyone else experiencing this problem?
I'm running Firefox 3.5.2 on Kubuntu 8.04 with an NVIDIA graphics card and my XServer version is 7.3.
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
t.im
?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I prefer www.socuteurl.com. It's just, irresistable. There. I said it. I've made the first step toward recovery.
Reply to That ||
There's already at least another one: ur1.ca It's from the same guys that made the open competitor to twitter called identi.ca / laconi.ca
Why so scared? From the story I understand that a) they release the source code under MIT license, and b) they report aggregate data associated with shortened URLs.
You don't know the shortened URLs? You can't associate them with the aggregated data, then.
They will be giving the same privacy as the rest of URL-shortening services.
Actually, I am thinking of creating a URL shortener inside my intranet. Here's a purpose that no one's thought of, or at least mentioned: it gives a layer of abstraction. Inside the company they can send emails, or put links on web pages that point to my URL shortener, let's say, "Company Policies". That link will always work no matter if the target web page stays on our legacy ASP system or gets moved to our shiny new Sharepoint. All they have to do to fix thousands of links is update the target in the shortener.
Does anyone know what language this one is in?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I always wondered how these haven't taken twitter so far, with all the URLs being shortened. I am not a huge fan of twitter, but it serves me well as a means of getting information quickly from a plethora of sources. But I realy have a bad feeling about people clicking without a second thought in all those shortened URLs. All it takes is to subvert a popular tweeter and bang.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
When I use tinyurl and such I kind of can know that all the destination urls wont be open data to everyone. Yeah, I know you shouldn't paste personals url via other sites, but people still do. Some privacy, please?
Go read Tiny URL's privacy policy. Go ahead, I'll still be here when you get back.
Read it? Great! Now show me where it said they won't display a list of links to anyone who asks.
Think about this for a minute. What information could anyone glean from knowing that a particular URL has been mapped, especially since you don't have to use an account to create the shortened URL so there's no way of showing who originally created it? Also, given that a given shortened URL is trivially resolvable to the original address, what privacy did you incorrectly think it was granting you?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Source code will be available... Grab it, remove all click-through and other aggregates, throw your own 'private' URL shortener out there (public domain, please).
oo
Secondarily I'm a little confused as to what you're replying to, since this has nothing to do with the GP post, but that's a whole separate issue.
I can already get the destination URL of any TinyURL identifier using their "preview" feature. Getting that data in list form just saves a little time. If you're concerned about privacy, you can either a.) not use URL-shortening services, or b.) keep private information off the Internet.
Think about this for a minute. What information could anyone glean from knowing that a particular URL has been mapped, especially since you don't have to use an account to create the shortened URL so there's no way of showing who originally created it? Also, given that a given shortened URL is trivially resolvable to the original address, what privacy did you incorrectly think it was granting you?
What about if you linked to your private pictures? Or maybe something even more personal. Such can give out lots of personal privacy info to everyone, and I dont really agree with that. Even if its the open source way to go. People use these services to short url links they give to people they know; they sure as hell shouldn't be available to everyone.
Yes, you can get the specific url from tinyurl. But thats not the point. If you have free access to the complete database *without knowing the url*, its gonna break privacy. People use these services to post personal images/information with short urls, and they shouldn't be available for everyone.
If they're private, they shouldn't be on the Internet. At the very least, they should be password protected. Depending on URL-shortening services to provide privacy when they were never designed nor intended to do that is simply foolish.
What about if you linked to your private pictures?
What are you doing with those links? If you're sending them via email, why not send the whole link? If you're posting them to Twitter or Facebook, then they're effectively public anyway and anyone could see your private pictures just by clinking the shortened links. It's not like they're password protected.
Help me understand this. What's a plausible use case where a shortened URL could potentially increase privacy?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I understand your point, and I know this very well aswell. But my point is that "normal users" aren't going to see it, but just trust these short url services and then they spread those links to everyone who want to see them. I would never use these for giving personal stuff to friends, but people who dont know that good about the issues do - which is what i'm worried about.
http://hugeurl.com/
---
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
If people haven't figure out by now that posting private information to the Internet isn't a good idea, then this probably won't hurt them any more than any of the other goofy things they're likely to do.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
With a really badass motorcycle race every year.
I'm sorry...
Twitter is a walled garden. To @reply someone, you have to go through Twitter.
Facebook is even more of a walled garden. There's a large number of things you can only do with other people on facebook, once you have a facebook account. And, facebook may keep your data forever.
But URL shorteners? I'm all for making things open source and interoperable, but all this does is make a long URL into a short one. What would opening it up accomplish compared to, say, making Facebook work with OpenID and XFN, or have Skype adopt SIP, or have MSN, AIM, and Yahoo messenger adopt Jabber?
Those are some walled gardens that could be torn down -- but really, I don't need an account with TinyURL to make a TinyURL, nor do I need one to follow a TinyURL, nor is there any way TinyURL is locking me in to using it instead of bit.ly or tr.im.
So, I'm all for tearing the walls down around these gardens, but I'd rather not see the "walled garden" metaphor abused until it's no longer useful.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Last year, I wrote a bot that generated/scanned/cataloged tinyurls. I'm sure others have as well, either out of boredom, curiousity, or for money. But please, go on posting private stuff.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Socuteurl sounds ridiculous but it works, when I need to text some url to my friends, so I don't have to type all the stupid nonsense characters and numbers (it is slow typing the numbers for most phones,) and either they or I will make some mistakes retyping the urls once more. BTW -- It works with phone calls, too. Socuteurl-dot-com-slash-huggie-buggie-bear or something like that - sweet!
http://so-smart.be/~ydbfe8
tr.im was BY FAR the flakiest URL shortener out there. It seemed to me like it was down or overloaded as often as it was up. The biggest reason not to use tr.im isn't bogeyman partnerships between Twitter and bit.ly, but this:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3565/3796342926_a4365424b1_o.png
Maybe I'd care more if tr.im weren't such cry babies about bit.ly.
There are millions of URL shorteners, the world would probably be a better place without tr.im tbh.
The winner is really the Man of the Isle...