TinyURL

TinyURL

TinyURL.com
File:TinyURL Screenshot.JPG Screenshot as of 01/05/08
Type of site	URL redirection
Owner	Gilby Productions
Created by	Kevin Gilbertson
Revenue	None, Donations, Advertising
URL	www.tinyurl.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	No

TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs. Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.

Service

The TinyURL website has a text box to enter a long URL. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed database and returns a short URL such as http://tinyurl.com/dmsfm . If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than creating a duplicate entry. The shorter URL is forwarded to the longer one.

Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they're easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, or microblogs that have a character limit for each post (140 in the case of Twitter). Also some email clients impose a maximum length at which they automatically break lines requiring the user to paste together a long URL rather than just clicking on it. A short URL alias is much less likely to become broken.

Criticism

The convenience offered by a TinyURL also introduces potential problems, which have led to criticism of the use of TinyURLs.

TinyURLs are opaque, hiding the ultimate destination from a web user. This can be used to send people unwittingly to shock sites, or crash or compromise their computer using browser vulnerabilities. To help combat such abuse, TinyURL allows a user to set a cookie-based preference such that TinyURL stops at the TinyURL website, giving a preview of the final link, when that user clicks TinyURLs. Substituting preview.tinyurl.com for tinyurl.com in the URL is another way of stopping at a preview of the final link before clicking through to it. Additionally, third party preview solutions exist. Opaqueness is also leveraged by spammers, who can use such links in spam (mostly blog spam), bypassing URL blacklists.

A more serious problem with URL resolvers in general is that they create a single point of failure for all URLs passed through the service.

In 2006, MySpace banned posting any TinyURLs.

Yahoo! Answers also experience errors when posting TinyURL links. "Sorry, Unable to process request at this time -- error 999." Error Message

Early abuses

Early on, the creation of TinyURL IDs was predictable, and therefore could be exploited by users to create vulgar associations. For example, http://tinyurl.com/dick was made to link to the White House website of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, and http://tinyurl.com/cunt was made to link to the website of Second Lady Lynne Cheney.

As of October 2008 the above TinyURL links are still functional but the preview pages (e.g. http://preview.tinyurl.com/dick) contain the following disclaimer:

This TinyURL was created by a user of our service back when the creation of the IDs for the TinyURL were sequential and predictable. This TinyURL in no way represents the beliefs of the people who bring you the TinyURL service and we apologize if this has brought offense to anyone.

Similar sites

The service has been duplicated on many other sites (there are at least 100, including one in Y-Combinator), many are simply domain alternatives (to pass though any domain name specific spam filters) but some sites offer additional features. NotifyURL.com sends an email when the link is first visited. SnipURL.com allows you to log in and manage your URLs. DwarfURL.com generates statistics. Adjix.com and Linkbee.com are ad-supported models of URL Shorteners that share the revenue with their users. MetaMark.com adds password protection. Several services also have browser add-ins.

Not all redirection is treated equally; the redirection instruction sent to a browser can contain in its header the HTTP status 301 (permanent redirect) or 302 (temporary redirect). The difference for Search Engine Optimisation is that search engines will more likely attribute the PageRank to the redirected site if it is a permanent redirect.

Custom alias

Starting in 2008, TinyURL allowed users to create custom, more meaningful aliases. This means that a user can create descriptive URLs such as, for example, http://tinyurl.com/wp-tinyurl rather than the randomly generated address specified above.

TinyURL-whacking

TinyURL's method of allocating shorter web addresses has been exploited by an action known as TinyURL-whacking. Random letters and numbers can be placed after the first forward slash in an attempt to hit interesting sites without knowing in advance what they will be. URL-Whacking is also used to trigger phishing pages, tricking the user to submit information to the page to steal information.

See also

• URL redirection

External links

• TinyURL
• Honey, I Shrunk the URL, Wired News
• Use TinyURL to Create Tiny Web Addresses, USNews.com
• Convert Long URLs to TinyURLs in DJ, Digital Journal
• Spam Spotted Using TinyURL, Brian Krebs
• TinyUrl Creator, a Mozilla plugin
• TinyURL Generator Widget
• Embiggen TinyURL, a bookmarklet for expanding TinyURLs
• Twitzer, a Mozilla Firefox addon which expands TinyURLs to actual links in the page itself