I'd argue that the majority of people that are using URL shorteners have a more fundamental problem: They don't even realize that most of the params aren't needed.
For example, I recently looked at this King Hokum CD on Amazon (awesome artist BTW, this CD is stupid overpriced though): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012U346Y/ref=s9_sims_gw_s...
What's the relevant part?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012U346Y
But how the hell does someone know that without dicking around?!
That still won't help someone who's trying to paste it into Twitter or a Facebook status feed.
Re:URL Shorteners – the herpes of the web
by tlrobinson on Monday April 20, 2009 @03:01AM
(#570322)
Those are problems that should be solved by Twitter and Facebook. Give people a way to put a link with shorter link text, something simple like Markdown [text](url) format.
If the message is being sent to SMS or some other constrained medium, then automatically shorten it. Chances are that link won't be distributed beyond the device it's sent to anyway.
Youtube helps users by providing a link for you to copy, sites like Amazon should do the same.
I agree, but please don't let that be the short link. The Amazon link DannoHung mentions is a bit weird, but Amazon's default links are really helpful, with the title in it. People often link to a book like this: "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Interfaces-Principles-In...; is a good book!" I find it useful that when I mouseover the link, I can see the title of the book, and then realize I either already know the book, don't like the book, or would like to read more. If the link is just <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596008031">this</a...; I have to click before knowing what exactly the book is that the person recommends.
Useful URL's are a good thing and it saddens me that the current debate does not focus on that more and that people even argue that standard url's should be short and non descriptive.
Yeah, but the title part just gets ignored: http://www.amazon.com/I-Can-Basically-Put-Anything-I-Want-In...
http://www.someone.tld/products/coolthing/
is better than
http://www.someone.tld/page?type=product&id=2386712&...
If you wanted to push this further, use your own permalink on your site, something like:
http://p.somesite.tld/23a44fd
It's not descriptive, but at least it gives you credit for the page.