Talk:TinyURL

Potential Advertising?

At the very end of the crisicism section, I found this quote, all by its lonesome: "and also a new shorten URL for map URL can be found at http://www.LocationMap.org and http://www.LocationMap.biz for shorten business map URL" Due to its complete lack of cohesion with the rest of the section, I removed it. If someone wants to clean it up and add it to the other links section, feel free. Serge (talk) 06:57, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

The Money

according to this blog, masl.to (make a link shorter) existed since 2001, before tinrurl and was bought of by tinyurl sometime between Mar 05, 2006 and Jan 19, 2007 according to the waybackmachine

how much money is behind tinyurl? how is it used? where does it come from? just adsense and donations?

--iftrueelsefalse 03:30, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

POV-check?

This page seems to be a marketing pitch, not a very neutral discussion of TinyURL. I think that TinyURL offers an intriguing and potentially valuable service but the article could use a more balanced treatment. "Short URL aliases are seen as useful" by whom? The TinyURL company, surely, but this seems an unsubstantiated comment. "A short URL alias is much less likely to become broken" is true only if the TinyURL link isn't itself blocked for reasons in the criticism section.

The 'criticism' section seems to say, "here are some problems people used to have with the service but it's completely perfect now" by concluding with "However, to combat this problem, TinyURL has now introduced previews, so that users can easily see what the link will take them to without visiting the link. This can be done using the sub-domain 'preview', such as preview.tinyurl.com/XXXXX." People who have never encountered TinyURL before are unlikely to know about the preview, so the masking of the actual destination still could have a very adverse effect on the unwary, unsuspecting, or simply (like the vast majority of users) unknowledgable.

Also, there are no citations within the article, though there are external links at the end. 216.93.229.207 08:00, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I strongly dissent. Three paragraph article and the second and longest paragraph is headed "criticism".

Please don't mistake this for a personal attack since I am only trying to gauge your familiarity with WP's ethos and operation so that I can better address your question:

• did you forget to sign in or
• are you brand new or
• do you have reasons for wishing to talk here anonymously?

...Gaimhreadhan^{(kiwiexile at DMOZ)} • 16:30, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

This is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, isn't it? Then why should anonymous users be subjected to the third degree? He's certainly not doing anything harmful.--209.243.31.233 04:56, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I feel like the anonymous user might be doing more harm then good. This article seems to be more favorable to tiny url. I was really surprised no mention of the back lash it had to twitter and bitty. Erifneerg (talk) 06:43, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

People behind it

Just wondered if anyone had any info on the people who set it up in the first pace? CharlesC 10:17, 4 January 2006 (UTC

Gilby Productions 4047 86th LN NE Blaine, MN 55014 US

see uwhois.com. Greets, User:Keimzelle (but too lazy to log in now) --83.180.234.99 20:06, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Expiry

Can someone include a definative answer as to whether or not TINYURL's ever expire?

"By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires." --Sketchee 06:19, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

The title seems wrong, I think? Should it not be TinyURL if it is referring to the actual service, even though it is becoming genericised? --Coffeelover 23:07, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

TinyURLs do not expire. They simply keep adding new keys to the database. And since each key has 36 possible combinations per character (letters and numbers), they have a lot of permutations in just five characters, which is what they currently use. They could easily go up to six at some point in the future. --Cyde Weys 21:50, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Reputation

Would it be fitting to put in some info about the infamous reputation of tinyurl urls leading to shock sites, as people can hide the urls of the shocksites behind a tinyurl?

02:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)says: I'd say not likely, because this is an article about a specific proprietary service or organization and since it could too easily become an issue of potential POV or original research and considering that such a reputation is a potential issue for any and all automated url shortening services: I'd only include that info if you can reference accredited or notable sources claiming the service carries that reputation or some neutral and reliable sources of study or other displayable evidence that this is indeed a NOTABLY established reputation of the service. (eg a site index from a notable source on the subject that specifically addresses the Tinyurl.com service in its documentation..or If a separate article on the subject exists and/or the service itself becomes considered notable on the subject and then also publishes content on their site(s), begins to offer related features, or in-act related policies that address that subject or otherwise becomes known to "police" its databases in regards to that subject,,, unless any of those conditions are met I would recommend instead creating a separate article or stub about the subject: "Shock sites and third party link shortening services" or such and provide content referencing what is in discussion/study by notable sources that these entities are doing(or NOT doing) relation to impact on the subject. Such an article would have to be non OR and contain information and citations for tinyurl.com's impact as it pertains to the subject of url masking abuse..or whatever else is the overall subject of the article..then it might become appropriate to add such a section since its my understanding that once something appears in wikipedia as an article or stub it can have references/links/"see also" sub topics to any other articles that it appears within. 71.239.87.234 (talk) 02:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Problems and suggestions about banning tinyurl

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#tinyurl http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#More_suggestions_about_tinyurl Travb 16:48, 21 February 2006 (UTC) Does anybody know why Wiki bans its use on pages? Baffles me.

Easter Eggs

I removed the Easter Egsg section as there are no Easter Eggs on TinyURL made by the "creator" (myself) as was incorrectly mentioned in the article. Early on the TinyURLs created were sequential and predictable on what the next one would be. This changed when they became 5 letter TinyURLs and it's now random. Since they were predictable, some people did create interesting, and in some cases politically biased, TinyURLs. If the easter egg section gets added back, please clarify that they were not "hard-coded" or put there by the creators of TinyURL and any political or other statements being made by these are not representative of the views of the people that run the TinyURL service. It'd also be recommended to list ones that are not swear words. UniGilby 19:17, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

this is off topic, but wikipedia IS NOT CENSORED

He's not asking for censorship. He's just clarifying that these things were not added by the creators of TinyURL, but by clever users. As such, they are not Easter EggsCogswobbletalk 01:13, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Sad, no clickable link.

Was going to remove the nowiki tags, because there is no need for them. But it seems there is..... couldn't it be taken of the blocklist or at least an exception be made for this one page somehow? Mathmo ^Talk 13:15, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

As far as I knooow, that's not possible. You might get a better answer at m:Spam blacklist and associated talk. Luna Santin 13:17, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Yup, I've posted elsewhere in the hope of getting it working on this page. Mathmo ^Talk 06:43, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, this is an obvious exception. In the meantime I've used simplelink (a similar service). I've removed the link to simplelink's homepage as it's perhaps spam.--82.148.54.182 15:24, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Couldn't the blacklist be edited to just block addresses with something after tinyurl.com/ ? That way, it would not block the homepage (so we could link to it here), but it would block links trying to reach bad pages through TinyURL. — Insanity Incarnate 04:32, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Deletion

User:The Kinslayer has proposed this article for deletion. Can I refer readers to Talk:Doiop: ``If it is felt that this article should be deleted then I would suggest also deleting the tinyurl article. In replacement for tinyurl and doiop may I suggest producing an article on shortening URLs with discussion of the available services and comparision of each"—Preceding unsigned comment added by Bah23 (talk • contribs) Agreed - the new article would be more informative and would not be promotional. [mht]

Order of alternatives

The alternatives should be listed alphabetically unless there is a good reason for doing otherwise, and so far no such reason has been provided. Tizio 19:11, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Furthermore, either we have a list of alternatives or none at all. Tizio 12:50, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Example tinyurl

I changed the example tinyurl to be the one that points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL . It's not particularly better than the one that points at Main Page, but it's no worse, either. --ESP 03:52, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

It's a better example, since it's a longer URL. -- Daniel Freeman 09:12, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

When TinyURL is no more

I am surprised no one has mentioned yet that if one day the service stops all the links that use it become invalid and irreparable. For me, that is a weakness enough to prevent its use other than in contents which will be used and discarded very soon. Outsid3r 06:59, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Want to add something, but is it self-promotion/COI?

First, declaration of bias/conflict of interest: I am the author of a MUD client called RosMud++ (or just RosMud in common speech). This is a free program, I do not get any money from its use, but nonetheless it's my creation and therefore it may be a COI for me to mention it.

Reason for mentioning: RosMud includes a plugin which interfaces with TinyURL. Effectively, it allows you to simply type a URL as part of a command that you otherwise type, and (if it's too long) it will automatically be sent to tinyurl.com, the response parsed, and the substitute URL sent on in place of the original. I have had a number of verbal (or otherwise transient) acclaims for this, but there's nothing written down, so I have a feeling this may well fall below the criterion of noteworthiness.

URL: http://www.kepl.com.au/esstu/rosmud.html (scroll most of the way to the bottom or search for "tinyurl")

Rosuav (talk) 17:36, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that it's worth mentioning something solely on the basis that it can generate TinyURLs. I mean, I've been on dozens of IRC channels where the bot does it automatically on-channel when you mention a URL. It's a good idea, but I don't think it's a notable one. The Wednesday Island (talk) 20:51, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm relatively new to Wikipedia editing and thought I'd better check first :) Rosuav (talk) 15:32, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

The whole tinyurl.com/dick story

I sent an email about the interruption of the auto-redirect to Dick Cheney's website via the TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/dick. I just received a response:

It's a pair of TinyURLs that this issue concerns.

- Gilby
TinyURL.com

A pair of TinyURLs... Knowing this, I started investigating. "What could be this second offensive tinyurl?" I found it.

http://tinyurl.com/cunt, which is a redirect to http://www.whitehouse.gov/mrscheney/, the website of Lynne Cheney. (→Zachary) 14:21, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Blacklisted External Link

The "TinyURL Generator Widget" link in the "External links" section leads to a webpage that has been blacklisted as fraudulent by Opera. It may, therefore, need to be removed from the list. --Kitsunegami (talk) 21:41, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

TinyURL-whacking

Is "TinyURL-whacking" real? Or enough so to be relevant? I'm not trying to cause trouble, it's just that I have been using TinyURL since close to the beginning and feel pretty familiar with the "culture" (floabt). And I have to say that I've never heard of TinyURL-whacking before reading this article. By no means does that deem it invalid, but I was certainly surprised to have learned of it here. Also, doesn't seem like much of an "exploit" as exploits go -- but maybe that's just my definition. Thanks Chabuhi (talk) 14:00, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Depends what you mean by "real". I thought of the idea one summer's day in 2002, played around, was mildly amused, wrote a brief blog post about it giving it that name, and thought no more of the matter. A few months later I was woken up by a phone call from a journalist from Wired who wanted to interview me about the blog post. Then from that the story was picked up by New Scientist and the Jerusalem Post. So you see there are plenty of published sources, and it's clearly possible, but as to whether people really do it, I couldn't tell you. I'm not still doing it six years later, anyway. :) Marnanel (talk) 17:53, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Who changed the redirect in 2009, as the article stattes? there is no feature to do that, is there? --Nezek (talk) 21:04, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Broken link removal

Removed this from the external links section:

• GiganticURL.com, a spoof of TinyURL

Seems to be broken. I haven't done a whois to see if the domain's still owned, but NS lookups are failing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rosuav (talk • contribs) 04:02, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

fixed now —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.108.233.59 (talk) 08:39, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

free software?

Is the tinyURL server software free software?

It's an information worth mentioning about the software any online service is running on.--Imz (talk) 17:59, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Why is it worth mentioning? TinyURL itself is not free software. The Wednesday Island (talk) 18:57, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Because it's a question one usually wants to know the answer about a software: whether one can also hack with it.

Yes, you gave the answer (no) -- I was asking exactly about TinyURL itself.--Imz (talk) 19:11, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh, sorry-- I thought you were asking whether the software that TinyURL was running on (like, Apache, mod_perl...) was free software. (It's a trivial service to write, though.) The Wednesday Island (talk) 19:45, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! I'm sorry for the unclear wording of the question.--Imz (talk) 20:17, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Criticism?

I've seen the thought raised in a few online coversations- What happens when the site crashes? Thousands of pages worldwide would be full of broken links. In some cases, the creators of said pages might not be able to remember what site it linked to initially. This could cause some serious problems. I think it could be considered critisicm, but there isn't really a way to cite it if included. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flytape8490 (talk • contribs) 16:06, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

I added some text in this section with proper reference, but it got deleted. Can someone explain why? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.58.239.3 (talk) 05:47, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

The edit summary explains. Firstly, you gave an incorrect URL. But even when the URL was fixed, it was only to a press release, not to independent third party press coverage, which doesn't establish notability. The Wednesday Island (talk) 13:37, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Myspace Ban?

The cite for the myspace ban is very weak, as it is a blog post and I can find no supporting evidence of such a ban when I did a search on myspace, actually I found a lot of areas that included a tiny url link. CelticLabyrinth (talk) 16:30, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

new critisism

currently they use 6 letters after the slash and when all combinations of that have been used up they will go on to 7 right? eventually the tiny url might be too long to be useful81.108.233.59 (talk) 08:51, 20 August 2008 (UTC)(sorry for spelling mistakes)

good point - should be in article although some nazi will come along and tell you wikipedia's not for original research - go put up a blog post about it and then it'll be ok... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.65.171.170 (talk) 18:34, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Title text

Why is the title text white on blue, instead of regular black on background? It looks pretty bad, imho--Unquenchablefire (talk) 21:02, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Can we have some sort of policy about what's allowed in "similar sites", so we don't turn into a link directory?

Can we have some sort of policy about what's allowed in "similar sites", so we don't turn into a link directory? The Wednesday Island (talk) 23:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Yahoo!Answers and tinyurl

The article states [with 'citation needed' marker] that using tinyurl in Yahoo!Answers often (or always) generates "error 999" which prevents an answer from being posted when the "submit" button is clicked. In fact it is just the opposite. Error 999 often (not always) occurs when trying to post an answer which contains a url that should link to another question on Yahoo!Answers. This may well be intended by Yahoo!Answers administration. The user workaround, at least for the time being (Jan 2009) is to map the url to a tinyurl and put this as the link instead. This ALLOWS the answer to be posted and AVOIDS the "error 999" message which normally blocks the answer from being posted.Jbuddenh (talk) 00:01, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Frankly, I don't see how Yahoo Answers's handling of TinyURLs is even noteable to this article. --Nezek (talk) 22:09, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Criticism

I think that someone should check out where tiny url's are blocked. It doesn't seem real. I know that facebook allows it. Someone needs to ref it or delete it. Irunongames • play 19:37, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Criticism section

I think the criticism section is somewhat poorly or misleadingly worded. Take this sentence: "TinyURLs are subject to linkrot, in the case the service stops working, all URLs related to the service will become broken." That's perfectly true, of course, but at the same time much too sweeping a thing to say. It's true for all similar services that have been mushrooming recently, like is.gd, tr.im etc. In contrast to them, however, tinyurl.com has been around for almost a decade and there aren't even any rumors about a possible demise. (I'm pretty sure that since 2002, more of the actual original links have rotted away than their tinyurl shortcuts.) So if we're talking about the danger of services closing down, tinyurl is actually pretty safe bank.

The same can be said about the danger of "rickrolling" or spamming - first, again this is a downside of all url shorteners, not just of tinyurl. It's a simple trade-off - short/indirect vs. long/direct. Second, tinyurl has been offering "preview" links for years, unlike all the other new services. Of course, people unfamiliar with tinyurl may still suspect it's a spoof, but once you do know it (and by now, many people do), the preview feature gives you reasonable security. To sum up, (1) criticism referring to URL shorteners as such should not be mixed up with specific criticism of tinyurl. (2) Tinyurl should not be blamed for things it can do nothing about but actually handles better than any of its "cooler", more "web 2.0"-like competitors.

Just to be clear, I'm in no way associated with the company. I've just been using it for years and feel it gets a bit of an unfair treatment here. Of course, that's probably because it used to be the epitome of URL shortening services, so it receives much of the criticism directed at URL shorteners as such. Still, with so many similar new services around, the criticism section needs to be updated urgently! Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 09:07, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Service is not down

The service status is wrong: the site works properly. Dgutson (talk) 20:19, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Abusive redirects

"Early on, the resulting URL aliases of the service were predictable, and were exploited by users to create vulgar associations."

Now, with the custom shortcut feature, the creation of abusive redirects became much more easy. Should I add this to the article? 27.69.194.132 (talk) 11:10, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Size of URL space

How big is TinyURL's namespace (i.e. the number of allowed permutations of letters and numbers in shortened URLs), and how many TinyURLs are currently registered? Credulity (talk) 10:26, 30 July 2012 (UTC)