Thoughts on Url Shorteners

The craze of url shortners have hyped up a lot becoz of Twitter, infact I was wondering to make one maybe just for fun.  But honestly it has always bothered me how much importance we should give a site like http://bit.ly/ for shorting urls for Twitter, is it really worth of such attention? I just read a excellent post on this by joshua.schachter [ founder of http://delicious.com ] why he feels url shortners are bad for the ecosystem & could not agree more on this. A shortened URL is not easier to remember. Even a longer URL like http://www.techfeedr.com/blog/2009/07/155/ is easier to remember than bit.ly/4RT7K. After some time if Twitter excludes URL’s from the 140 character limit and ¾ of the tinyurl services will shut up shop in a few months. Normal people won’t go out of their way to try and create tiny URL’s, they’ll just copy and paste the full URL.

Thousands of development hours and X million dollars in VC cash later and they’ll all have created a massive collection of 404′s. Great job, yet another sensible year in Silicon Valley… Read full post by joshu HERE

August 10, 2009

Posted in Internet/Browsers, Uncategorized, Web and tagged backlinks, Internet, Startup, twitter.