On 2010-09-20, Tim Harig <user...@ilthio.net> wrote: > On 2010-09-20, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote: >> * No hint as to what site you'll be getting redirected to.
> Tinyurl, in particular, allows you to preview the url if you choose to do > so. Other URL shortning services have a similar feature. I have no idea how. If I see a "tinyurl" URL, and I paste it into a browser, last I tried it, I ended up on whatever page it redirected to. >> * No cues from URL as to what the link is to. > Same point as above. Same solution. I'm not reading news in a web browser. I don't want to have to cut and paste and go look at a page in order to determine whether I want to switch to my browser. >> * If the service ever goes away, the links become pure noise. > This happens a lot on the web anyway. True. > Do you have any idea how many > pieces of free software are first hosted on university servers to > disappear when the author graduates/moves to another school or free > shared host servers that have to be moved due to lack of scalability? > Sourceforge solved much of this problem; but, then if sourceforge should > ever disappear, all of its links will be pure noise as well. This is true. But two points of failure strikes me as worse than one. :) > The simple fact is that the Internet changes. It changed before URL > shortening services came into the mainstream and it will be true long > after they have left. Oh, certainly. I'm not particularly convinced that these are *significant* complaints about URL-shorteners. But I will say, of the last couple hundred links I've followed from Usenet posts, precisely zero of them were through URL redirectors. If I can't at least look at the URL to get some initial impression of what it's a link to, I'm not going to the trouble of swapping to a web browser to find out. -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated! I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
