The Hyperlink Grows Up: The Times Releases New Linking Features Here’s how it works. In the story above, the base URL is: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html If you wanted to link to a specific paragraph, you’d simply add a “#” and the number of the paragraph, e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2 You can even go a step deeper and skip to […]
Category: URL Design
Shortly Over Part 2: Twitter Returns Long URLs
After maintaining years of awkward, inconsistent URL shortening behavior because of some vague argument about SMS capabilities – Twitter has announced links passed through their service may or may not be shortened to t.co. “A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed […]
URL Shorteners Are So Last Year
URL shorteners were all the rage in 2008 and 2009 – primarily due to the character constraints within the short messages service that was all the rage in 2008 and 2009 – Twitter. URL shorteners take a long url, for example, this Google Map url: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=the+red+pepper,+plymouth,+mn&fb=1&split=1&gl=us&cid=1854680882426337660&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A and transform it into something like: http://tinyurl.com/y3lxdru Every URL […]
Mike Keliher on Short URL Trust
“When you see a TinyURL, you have no idea what the link is going to point you to. Viruses, spyware, porn and all sorts of other unwanted or inappropriate stuff are just a click away. …what if you actually could trust a shortened URL?….The need for safety and security online will not go away. Don’t […]
Cull.us: Branded URL Shortener with Google Analytics, CNAME, and .htaccess
One of the biggest problems with URL shorteners – aside from being needed at all – is it’s not easy to move from one to another without breaking all the previous links. Culld.us hopes to change all that. Use Your Own Domain Name At Culld.us, you get a subdomain – like grv.culld.us – and just […]
Culld.Us – URL Shortening Reimagined
We don’t shorten URLs just to shorten them. We shorten them for the same reason big box retailers sell flat-pack furniture – greater confidence during transport. With that in mind, I’ve completely rebuilt Cullect’s URL Shortener1 – http://culld.us It’s still custom brand-able. In a way I’m much happier with than in the previous version – […]
Talking Short URLs with Zack from Nieman Lab
Zack Seward from Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab and I talked about URL shorteners yesterday – and the responsibility of publishers to shorten themselves… “The really, really big benefit in that case is that it’s no longer a redirect…” …and the additional opportunity for a focused, curated, short URL service…. “he raised an idea that’s been […]
Shortly Over
“No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.” I appreciate tr.im’s honesty. From what I understand, tr.im’s business model was similar to bit.ly’s and – what increasingly feels like – Twitter’s business model: aggregate and sell statistics on how information is being shared on real-time basis. Measuring word-of-mouse if you […]
DickensURL.com – Extra Short Stories
There’s lots of silly URL shorteners. Some of my favorites – not just because of their silliness, but because they offer some interesting potential; GiantURL – takes a regular URL and transforms it into a multi-line, unreadable, hash. Potentially, the information you’re sharing could be encoded into the hash, rather than redirected. Hmmm. what’s the […]
More Usable URLs: Twitter.com
URLs are consistently the least usable aspect of our interaction with web-based information services – which is terribly unfortunate considering their prominence in how we access, share, and interact with these services. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how Twitter’s URLs could be more usable – by either being more logical, more […]