On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> There are many places where there are limits (hard or soft) on message >> lengths. Some of us still use MUDs and 80-character line limits. >> Business cards or other printed media need to be transcribed by hand. >> Dictation of URLs becomes virtually impossible when they're >> arbitrarily long. > > > Your typical shortened URL made up of a random jumble > of letters and numbers isn't good for dictating or > transcribing from a business card either. > > For those uses, a well-chosen semantically-memorable > URL is still the best solution. There shouldn't be > too much trouble in arranging one of those that's > short enough to put on a business card.
Quite a few URL shorteners allow you to pick a keyword (conditionally on it not being in use, of course). For example, http://bit.ly/threshvote is perfectly memorable, but is still shorter than the address it redirects to. Given that it's a mobile app download link, it's extremely helpful for people to be able to type that without clicking on it; and since it's going to the Google Play Store, the creator of the app has no power to shorten the official URL. In some cases, the correct solution would be a short URL at a domain that the provider controls. But that's no different from running your own shortener service - it still has the extra indirection and consequent risks. So for a lot of people, a public shortener is just as good. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
