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A comment on Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web.

Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by saurik on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @04:17AM (#7803448)
> Link shorteners appeared as a consequence of the rise of Twitter. With a 140 characters limitation, sending full links over the micro blogging network was almost impossible.

No. The first extremely popular link shortener was TinyURL, and it launched in 2002, years before Twitter existed. Link shorteners became popular because URLs for some websites are extremely long and unweildy, and are thereby difficult to type; they also have tons of puncutation, and are at danger of being mangled by various transports due to line wrapping, escaping, and character mapping.

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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by robert_tweed on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:23AM (#7803867)
Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a common and pretty annoying problem.

IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the first to be popularised by Twitter.

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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by dfc on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:08PM (#7805170)
What is the ironic reason that explains tinyurl supplanting makeashorterlink?
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by heinrich5991 on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:23PM (#7805244)
That makeashorterlink is unneccessarily long I guess.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by dfc on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @09:48PM (#7807953)
I like my irony served with less inevitability.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by dons on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:24AM (#7803871)
Yeah. We used started using tinyurl on #haskell IRC by 2003 because long urls would break line wrapping, get mangled, not be typeable etc.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by elinchrome on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:32AM (#7803893)
Please explain your "typeable" concern. I've been using IRC since the dawn of time and I could always copy and paste. Not to mention that links are recognized and you can click them.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by rikkus on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @11:30AM (#7804955)
Copy and paste didn't work too well on serial terminals. How far back was this 'dawn of time'?
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by elinchrome on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @09:03PM (#7807831)
Mid nineties.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by FroshKiller on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:43AM (#7803924)
I'm going to hazard a guess that you're a Windows or Mac user.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by sp332 on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:57AM (#7803969)
Well you can paste into irssi too.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by npsimons on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:10PM (#7805179)
Middle-click much?
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by smtddr on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @09:17AM (#7804265)
i̶r̶s̶s̶i̶, or rather the terminal it's running in according to the person replying my comment, lets you click on links to open a browser too.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by bluefinity on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @09:37AM (#7804338)
That's the terminal, not irssi.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by fdevillamil on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @04:58AM (#7803552)
Thank you for mentioning this, I'll correct the article accordingly.

[edit] Fixed

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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by ABS on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @06:40AM (#7803772)
they existed way before 2002. I used to use welcome.to/ back in 1997 or 1998 to give out a shorter URL to my very long geocities one
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by redbearded on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @11:47AM (#7805047)
Good ol' geocities. Now that takes me back!
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by andrewrice on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @11:15AM (#7804873)
While not really a URL shortener in the tinyurl sense, cjb.net offered sub-domains for URL redirection that effectively shortened long URLs (ie: mysite.cjb.net) since the late-1990s; it was a pretty popular in the gaming community.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by Argorak on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @09:14AM (#7804249)
Also, many paper magazines had similar services (often called "quicklinks" or similar) for a long time where they would just print the URL or even just the ID of the link, for easy lookup on their website.
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Re:Link shorteners hurt the user experience and destroy the Web by daigoba66 on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @07:15AM (#7803849)
In college everyone used NNTP. Well, CS students used it anyway. But the proper netiquette was to used shortened URLs when possible with the goal to reduce typing all around.
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