Neat. Thanks for sharing the tip!

Thomas, this is a cool convention. We had this conversation on another mailing list where we used the TinyURL convention a lot, and the concern was the integrity of archives where there may not be a way to retrieve whatever the original URL was should TU not last.

No big deal for general correspondence, but a little food for thought when using it in docs where the linkage might be important for some time to come.

Cheers :^)

Sue.

Connection of invention, plus current and future state of TinyURL to sociology, participatory online democracy, human Noospheric awareness, etc.

I used to have a professor at Caltech who would always say, "consider this example but think in general" (Bob McEliece, who taught/teaches mathematical coding theory, among other things, and who shared a dear friend with me, Gus Solomon, the inventor of Reed-Solomon codes... but anyway... ).

Consider The Example of TINYURLs and Think in General

Problem: URLs are unwieldy

Who Has Problem: most everyone using the Internet

Solution: Automated mapping system to alphanumeric coded shorthand URL

Problem?: integrity of the system (that URLs will be sustained)

Discussion: The last I check - a few weeks ago - the folks at TinyURL said that those tinyurls will last forever. For this to be the case, the translation service must always operate, but TinyURL probably has some probability of going away.

Meta-Problem: The solution offered by a small group (the TinyURL folks) is adopted by a very broad group who have interest in the integrity of that system (likely CEO, congressman, Nobel prize winners, etc.). And yet, collectively - to my awareness - we have not bulletproofed the system to a most obvious bullet ... that TinyURL ceases to be funded. What does that mean?... I am not sure, but what if the honorable chap who brought us this nice tool, Kevin Gilbertson, suffered from a airplane crash or something?

Perhaps there is a doctor who relies on TinyURL to look up patient records (admittedly a very unlikely case), or suppose that a Boeing airplane design engineer used TinyURLs to keep track of research studies dealing with various structural design anomalies -- say the one that no one else had really noticed or been paying attention to? See what I am thinking?

Anyhow, I will send a note to Kevin/Gilby about the discussion here which chose TinyURL as the topic, BUT THE IMPORTANT PART OF THIS HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH TINYURL ... it has to do with generalizing the discussion to the greatest concerns of society.

What depth of inquiry or discussion has been shared or engaged in on global warming, the end of oil, etc. in the selection of our greatest leaders? Let me first define leaders conventionally (N.B. that Peter Senge of MIT and others would take issue with this definition, as inconsistent with true leadership, servant-leadership). These leaders in order of power are 1) corporate leaders, 2) government leaders. Corporate leaders are conflicted, because they are leading the very vessels of consumption-based growth whose mounting wakes could create (are creating?!) biospheric havoc. The good news is they are aware of this. The bad news is that tradition has them still focusing first on profit.

The point of this entire post is that true leadership is perhaps in seeing the storm and helping humanity to avoid its worst potential encountering with the storm: i.e. education, communication and vision - in any order, with communication done particularly by example.

Famous thinkers regularly have converged on such themes from Tolstoy to Democritus.

Reed, thanks for taking this deeper than I ever thought it could go. Lots to think about in your post.

Even better, what if someone performs a hostile takeover of tinyurl, and then redirects the URLs in its database to subversive content related to the original URLs?

Simplest example might be redirecting Amazon.com URLs to BarnesAndNoble.com URLs.

(Sorry to inject humor -- I know you meant your meta-comments seriously, and it is in fact a very interesting problem.)

I am sure there are those trying to access the router right now.., lol

Could we avoid exposure to hostility if we had the feature built into Omidyar Network ; )

There again, it somewhat is built into the Wiki isn't it. Just requires some effort to embed it.

If Google were a metaphor for asking someone on the street for directions and TinyURL was a metaphor for already knowing where to go, then I guess I'd rather have TinyURL spoofed than Google, because if suddenly everything appeared different from how we saw it and we were compelled to connect better with other people to find out where things really were, we'd probably experience both a lot more fun and humor from the context of socializing our direction finding, and probably together find a lot better direction for everyone in the process!

Unfortunately, although spoofing TinyURL would be funny as hell, what that is a metphor for probably is the opposite...

(Thanks for the humor!)

Taking a very simplistic approach... :-)

TinyURL accepts donations. I regard each donation as an investment in the longevity of the site.

I've been using TinyURL for a long time for my magazine articles. A huge percentage of URLs are too long to fit on a single line in three-column magazine layout, so instead of directing readers to a mega-URL, I make a TinyURL and use it in the mag. I realise this might put a time limit on some of my articles, but given the nature of articles in computer mags, I don't think it's a big problem. Anyway, each time I use a TinyURL in the mag, I make a donation to them. And, to date, every single one of those URLs still functions.

Rose

BTW, there are some other sites providing a similar service (although Tiny's my favourite), including:

• the ironically long-winded Make a shorter link
• TinyURL UK
• Shorl
• ShorterLink
• and the excellent SnipURL.

And just for fun there's also TinyURL Whacking.

Oh, and TinyURL lets you redirect to any page in a site. So, if you convert:

http://www.veryveryveryveryveryveryverylongname.com

to:

http://tinyurl.com/34q

you can get to the /pdfs/manual.pdf file with:

http://tinyurl.com/34q/pdfs/manual.pdf

Cheers,

Rose

I HAVE A QUESTION? WHAT IF THE TINY URL EXPIRES,WHO KEEPS THE UPKEEP AND HOW MUCH DOES IT COST AND WHO PAYS FOR IT.

Dan, good questions. Would you mind turning the Caps Lock off? I can hear you fine in lowercase :)

it would be easy to build the same thing, only within OMnet's server.. so, if anything happens the links won't break

:)

A new idea for aspiring terrorist(s):

McRansom

;-p

nmw

Thomas, Re if you put a tiny URL in an email or post, be sure to say in adjacent text what it is. Many people fail to do so, and people generally resist clicking links if they don't know where they go. Best Robert