[H-GEN] And the winner of the shortest URL shortener is ...

Edwin Groothuis edwin at mavetju.org
Thu Apr 8 06:57:02 EDT 2010


On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 07:05:33PM +1000, Russell Stuart wrote:
> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
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> 
> No doubt you are all aware of URL shorteners.  I think the original was
> http://tinyurl.com.  But when you think about it, the domain name
> tinyurl.com isn't very short.
> 
> Then came http://bit.ly which is definitely better but there is still
> room for improvement.  Then the aptly named http://tweak.tk gave bit.ly
> a run for their money and mapped URL's to domain names (*twitch*), but
> tweak.tk is rather a lot to type.  The owners of bit.ly replied by
> buying http://j.mp which I thought was a masterstroke.  It seems like it
> was about as short as you could get while having a good acronym.
> 
> But no, I was wrong on both counts.  Now we have http://to.  Surely this
> marks the end of the race, short of ICANN inventing a special TLD just
> for this purpose.

Run a webserver on localhost (http://0/foobar) and a script which redirects
the URL to http://to/foobar is one shorter!

Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis		Website: http://www.mavetju.org/
edwin at mavetju.org	Weblog:  http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/



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