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Check out this funny video about cats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IytNBm8WA1c
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Check out this funny video about cats: http://bit.ly/hrbuTl
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Check this out! http://bj6.fi.gd/funny/cats/video
Created
August 28, 2011 15:30
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Save devongovett/1176791 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Even better would be to create a shorter URL on your own site for that flyer so at least you own your own links and they are are at your own domain name...
@Me1000 for the same reason phone numbers are more convenient than
domain names? (ie. usually shorter + random characters instead of
meaningful ones). </irony>
If you're handing out bit.ly URLs for your _own_ website, either your
URLs suck, or as @devongovett suggests, you need a shortener for your
own website (as.. New York Times, and lots of otehrs do).
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Me1000 ***@***.*** wrote:
Likely #3
I never click YouTube URLs. I rarely click bit.ly URLs (for obvious reasons), but at least the URL in #3 is farely descriptive enough. In all honesty though, my bias against YouTube could be hindering accuracy in my vote. ;)
Truth is, who cares? URL shorteners are super useful, for more than just twitter. Imagine printing put flyers to hand to people... Asking someone to type in a very long URL is a terrible idea. (there are valid reasons for this, so changing the flow for the user is not alwas an option) on the otherhand a short URL with a descriptive path would be very useful.
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Except or 99% of organizations, that is not an option. Most aren't even technical enough to understand what a domain name is. I'm talking about people and organizations who CAN'T change their address. mycountypubliclibrary.org/users/?action=signup, etc
I think you're all being blinded by your understanding of the subject, think about if your mother were put in charge of printing out these flyers, and she had to list a 100 character URL...
@Me1000 just because I have, ideally, high standards, doesn't mean I'm
not pragmatic. Just one month ago, I had to print out flyers with a
(custom) bit.ly url to a website I had no power about at all...
Debates are ideas, real-world is best-effort.
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Me1000 ***@***.*** wrote:
I think you're all being blinded by your understanding of the subject, think about if your mother were put in charge of printing out these flyers, and she had to list a 100 character URL...
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@Me1000 and thanks to bit.ly pro, you can make your own URL shortener on your own domain name without technical knowhow. That's how nyt.ms and other custom shorteners work.
i agree that "branded" short domains are somewhat useful... but http://nyti.ms/az63dh is almost as bad as http://bit.ly/az63dh. How much better would http://nyti.ms/obama/healthcare/speech be?
In any case, @goLookAt offers this "domain white-labeling" just like bit.ly pro... so the NY Times could easily get http://a3z.nyti.ms/obama/healthcare/speech -- a URL that identifies (sorta) the owner of the domain (NY Times) for anyone who is a geek and gets "domain hacks" (my mom sure doesn't), but it's a self-descriptive URL that entices more clicks AND is friendlier.
The whole reason bit.ly offered vanity short domains is that people recognize the need for better URLs inherently, and it's just one way to go about that, again as @Me1000 said above, for people who don't control the URLs of the sites that they are sharing.
There's one hitch... all the current vanity shorteners require you to compete for the unique vanity "slug" to use, and they character limit it. Once someone gets "obama-speech", you can't use that, even if it's the perfect descriptor for a link.
@goLookAt on the other hand creates the uniqueness through the sub-domain being the slug, and lets the stuff on the right (what I call "link tags") to be non-unique (no first-come-first-served competition) and basically unrestricted.
In other words, @goLookAt provides much more flexibility in creating vanity short URLs, and that's really the main goal, so that people will make and share better URLs.
Honestly, the more fair poll here would be:
Which link are you more likely to click on?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IytNBm8WA1c
OR
Just curious, what's the a3z for in a3z.nyti.ms ?
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 9:45 PM, getify ***@***.*** wrote:
i agree that "branded" short domains are somewhat useful... but http://nyti.ms/az63dh is almost as bad as http://bit.ly/az63dh. How much better would http://nyti.ms/obama/healthcare/speech be?
In any case, @goLookAt offers this "domain white-labeling" just like bit.ly pro... so the NY Times could easily get http://a3z.nyti.ms/obama/healthcare/speech -- a URL that identifies (sorta) the owner of the domain (NY Times) for anyone who is a geek and gets "domain hacks" (my mom sure doesn't), but it's a self-descriptive URL that entices more clicks AND is friendlier.
The whole reason bit.ly offered vanity short domains is that people recognize the need for better URLs inherently, and it's just one way to go about that, again as @Me1000 said above, for people who don't control the URLs of the sites that they are sharing.
There's one hitch... all the current vanity shorteners require you to compete for the unique vanity "slug" to use, and they character limit it. Once someone gets "obama-speech", you can't use that, even if it's the perfect descriptor for a link.
@goLookAt on the other hand creates the uniqueness through the sub-domain being the slug, and lets the stuff on the right (what I call "link tags") to be non-unique (no first-come-first-served competition) and basically unrestricted.
In other words, @goLookAt provides much more flexibility in creating vanity short URLs, and that's really the main goal, so that people will make _and share_ better URLs.
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And the more specific psychological question is, in those two links, when a normal user sees them, which part do they more care about, and which part more catches their eye. Is "www.youtube.com" the important part? Well, it's sorta important, it identifies the site, but not at all the content. I certainly don't want to see every video that's posted to youtube.
If we're talking about that, we're comparing:
iytnbm8wa1c.youtu.be
If domain matters (in other words, if real end users even understand domain names), then both have "youtube" in them, so most users are likely to trust or like either one equally (maybe slightly more in favor of the traditional "www.youtube.com").
But clients can (and many do) highlight only the main domain, so it could look like:
www. youtube.com
iytnbm8wa1c. youtu.be
I see both URLs as clearly belonging to youtube. I trust both equally on that regard.
Or, is the right-hand side (where the content is normally identified) more important? In this respect, you're comparing:
watch?v=IytNBm8WA1c
funny/cats/video
I dunno about you, but I think there's a clear winner there, for the people who care about the "content" portion of the URL.
Just curious, what's the a3z for in a3z.nyti.ms ?
The way @goLookAt works (in other words, if NYTimes were a customer of @goLookAt), the subdomain is the auto-generated "slug" of letters/numbers that uniquely identifies a short-URL.
So, http://bit.ly/ab423d is like http://ab423d.go.ly --> The difference being that with mine, the right hand side of the URL is free for non-unique link tags to make the domain have vanity clickability and appeal.
If NYTimes used @goLookAt. they'd get shortened URLs like http://ab423d.nyti.ms/ And then they could, contextually from the article, add 2-3 keywords onto the end of the URL to make it prettier and more self-descriptive... like http://ab423d.nytim.ms/obama/healthcare/speech
probably the best approach would be to have youtube.com/IytNBm8WA1c/funny/cats both URLs are kind of the same length, youtube.com being the central domain and with the description in the URL everybody is satisfied.
I would probably click on both as i trust both youtu.be and youtube.com, but for regular users the above would be satisfying the need of trust worthy link to click on.
@RobertDoroftei--
The reason i chose sub-domains instead of the first part of the path is because I wanted the ugly, non-useful stuff to be as far to one-side of the URL as possible, freeing up the content portion of the URL for, what I consider to be, the most important part.. the keywords identifying the content. In your suggestion, i have to hunt for where the useful stuff starts a bit more than if the "slug" was separated from the keywords.
youtube.com vs. youtu.be is really not the important part (like I said, they're equal in my mind)... you could just as easily do:
http://iytnbm8wa1c.youtube.com/funny/cats/video
You'd get the same effect (a domain that is to some extent trustable) then some really useful keyword optimized (low-noise) content portion of the URL that lets you know what you're about to go see.
@getify You're missing the point: nobody trusts
http://osiéoakjswhatever.yutubescam.com/hey/look/random7keywords.
Because it's easy to register for yutubescam.com but not for youtu.be
or youtube.com - that's the kind of trust you can't fake. Besides,
having random characters in front of a URL is a _huge_ turn-off. It's
just contrary to everything you see on the web nowadays. E.g.
http://typewith.me/Vpea6djVU6 - people read from left to right (.. in
LTR languages, okay) and read.. "type with.. me okay, some kind of
collaborative stuff, and... V p e a whatever, probably an id, let's
click that".
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 10:53 PM, getify ***@***.*** wrote:
@RobertDoroftei--
The reason i chose sub-domains instead of the first part of the path is because I wanted the ugly, non-useful stuff to be as far to one-side of the URL as possible, freeing up the content portion of the URL for, what I consider to be, the most important part.. the keywords identifying the content. In your suggestion, i have to hunt for where the useful stuff starts a bit more than if the "slug" was separated from the keywords.
youtube.com vs. youtu.be is really not the important part (like I said, they're equal in my mind)... you could just as easily do:
http://iytnbm8wa1c.youtube.com/funny/cats/video
You'd get the same effect (a domain that is to some extent trustable) then some really useful keyword optimized (low-noise) content portion of the URL that lets you know what you're about to go see.
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@getify
Then, if the domain isn't important, a subdomain is really the best
choice, as people will just ignore the hash string and just focus on
the descriptive URL
…On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 11:53 PM, getify ***@***.*** wrote:
@RobertDoroftei--
The reason i chose sub-domains instead of the first part of the path is because I wanted the ugly, non-useful stuff to be as far to one-side of the URL as possible, freeing up the content portion of the URL for, what I consider to be, the most important part.. the keywords identifying the content. In your suggestion, i have to hunt for where the useful stuff starts a bit more than if the "slug" was separated from the keywords.
youtube.com vs. youtu.be is really not the important part (like I said, they're equal in my mind)... you could just as easily do:
http://iytnbm8wa1c.youtube.com/funny/cats/video
You'd get the same effect (a domain that is to some extent trustable) then some really useful keyword optimized (low-noise) content portion of the URL that lets you know what you're about to go see.
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this is not about scam, if you see 9sad8f.google.com/whatever/you/want/here probably you'll just ignore the whole string at the beginning, if the domain has weight then people are just taking for granted that it's not some trick to get into a scam of some sort.
_sigh_
@RobertDoroftei if it's *.google.com then, yes, technically-aware
people will know it has to be googley somehow. HOWEVER, it's entirely
possible that non-technical people will consider 9sad8f.google.com
untrustworthy, considering they have no idea why stuff is separated by
dots anyway, and why order matters. People are much more likely to
ignore stuff on the right than on the left.
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 11:04 PM, RobertDoroftei ***@***.*** wrote:
@nddrylliog
this is not about scam, if you see 9sad8f.google.com/whatever/you/want/here probably you'll just ignore the whole string at the beginning, if the domain has weight then people are just taking for granted that it's not some trick to get into a scam of some sort.
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No, respectfully speaking, you're missing the/my point. No URL is really all that much more trustworthy to the uninformed web user masses than any other. Does my mom know that "smashingmag.com" is a valid domain but "smashing-mag.com" isn't? Does my mom know that "tumblr.com" is valid but "tumbler.com" isn't the same site? No.
Geeks assign a lot of meaning (context and understanding) to domain names that real users don't.
There IS a problem that needs to be solved of how to trust URLs before you click on them. But this problem is separate from, and orthagonal to, the problem I'm talking about here. The stuff I'm gonna try to do with @linkSafely, and also the suggestions I'm making for browsers/clients, is a more effective way to address link-safety... but expecting my mom to know the difference between a trustable domain like "whitehouse.gov" and a bad domain like "whitehouse.com" is far inferior and it's why we still, 25 years on, don't have a good trustable URL system on the web.
I could put up a deliberately deceptive blog URL like this http://blog.getify.com/javascript-is-awesome and at that URL, I could have all kinds of offensive insults about why javascript sucks. No URL is trustable just because of its domain name. It's a false sense of security that we rely on, to tell people "oh, i recognize that domain name, therefore it must be safe".
For years anti-phishing efforts have been trying to educate users "look at the domain name of your bank account link before you click it." And for years, they've utterly failed to fix that problem for the masses. No amount of "but the domain is important" is going to make such things "click" in a non-geek's mind.
The link safety and trustability problem is real, but it affects all URLs basically uniformly. I have ideas on how to address it, but first we have to change the mindsets that people currently have about what URLs should be and not be. Otherwise, we're gonna stay stuck in this rut that never actually addresses any of the problems.
The point I've been trying to make is how to get URLs that are more optimized for human-friendly reading. Wherever you put "Vpea6djVU6" in the URL, people's eyes are gonna glaze over it. But if you also have useful information in the URL, then the URL looks more interesting and describes itself to you, which most non-geek users will prefer.
If I have a URL like
http://blog.getify.com/2011/01/03/101-reasons-why-javascript-is-aw.html <-- URLs annoyingly truncate themselves all the time
That's an OK URL, but it's not as enticing or human-friendly as:
In other words, if there was (or i should say, WHEN THERE IS) a solution to link safety that doesn't rely on merely "just look at the domain name to trust it", that solution to link safety and trustability would work for google, youtube, NYTimes, techcrunch, and my shortener all equally. That's why I say it's an orthagonal (but important) problem.
In the interim, I think browsers and clients can go a long way toward making wrapped links still more trustable and safe, and I hope they will continue in those efforts. I just don't think we should throw out all link shortening/aliasing ideas because we haven't yet solved link safety.
Once we have a system that allows me to know that both of these URLs are valid and point to what I think they point to, then we still have the question I care more about right now (which one is more readable and gets more clicks)?
People are much more likely to ignore stuff on the right than on the left.
I think the reason this is true is precisely what I'm trying to reverse by changing how people think about URLs. For so long, people haven't cared about making good readable URLs, so people have gotten accustomed to ignoring them.
But when you think about it, the "source" of information (the domain) is really secondary to the information itself (the content part of the URL) in terms of relevance to my life right now.
If there's dozens of URLs flying by per minute in my twitter stream, I don't care as much the domains of the URLs being safe (I tend to trust the people who I choose specifically to follow), but I care about my valuable time and I personally want to click on URLs that I know are going to give me interesting content worth my reading. If I'm not in the mood to see a video about funny cats, then I'd rather the URL tell me what it is on the label, so I can not click it, then force me to click through to youtube before I know if it's content I care about.
1 as you can post longer links on Twitter now (the text gets truncated to fill 140 chars, the link remains clickable).
I would not want to click 3 as it sounds cheesy and faked.
@getify there is a technical problem with putting the valuable information on the right, which is that the twitter website and official apps expect the opposite and truncate links. This cuts off your tags and makes them much less valuable, showing the user only the ugly random domain names. At least I know what domain I'll be going to with the first option even if part of the actual path gets cut off. With the your option, the tags get cut off and I have NO valuable information rather than at least the domain. This would make me much less apt to click on those links, because it would be easier for spammers to use them to fool users.
actually, the official twitter clients don't work like you say. They display the entire domain (any length) and then it shows 15 chars of the path... enough to see 2-3 keywords in most of my tests. Since the path is the length limited portion of the URL (the domain doesn't affect it), it actually makes more sense to do it like I am doing, because you don't waste 6-7 of your 15 chars on the slug, like bitly URLs do.
I can understand that most people on this thread are disbelieving of the "more clicks" claim... I have performed dozens of tests myself, as have a number of high-follower-count twitter users, and the clear pattern is about a 10% boost in number of recorded clicks (even when filtering out bot traffic).
I'm experimenting trying to make URLs better, and I'm still going at it because the results are promising so far. It's fine for you to disagree or call me wrong (these ideas are not for everyone), but the proof is in the clicks. I wish more people were supporters of trying to make things better instead of blindly doubting that it can ever be fixed. I know my ideas are ambitious and unlikely, but I don't think they're futile.
It's easy to hate, but it's much harder to step up and try to do something about it.
I would think that funnycatvideo.youtube.fi.gd/j2xn would be better. I tend to read things (like I read the words surrounding the url) from left to right. When I hit a urlesque formation my eyes brace for noise and skips over a good portion of it.
@getify did you test to see if people just clicked those links because it's a funny looking url rather than people actually preferring those urls?
The description of the content should be what the rest of the post is for. Instead, I guess a sufficiently (maybe too) smart twitter client could read the tweets and automagically change it to "Check out this funny video of cats (youtube.com "Rick Astley")." Where it would take a link and hyperlink the previous four words (or wherever some pronoun is used), and instead of where the URL would go, replace it with a parenthetical containing the domain and a few words taken from the page.
Sticking the description into the URL makes it longer. A URL is meant to locate something, and if a user is going ot type it or share it with someone else, having a long URL isn't good. A url should be to some extent bidirectionally unique: a webpage has one url and all links to that web page have one url. That way, if six people you follow send you to get rickrolled, you notice that that thing someone's sending you to is in fact just another rickroll.
The URL is usually decided by the author of the page. "Check this out blah.blah/cute/cat/video" doesn't say who's calling the video "cute" (or about cats). Does the original author/creator think that the video is cute? Or is it the person who wrote the tweet who decided that cute is an appropriate description?
@nddrylliog
wouldn't it be great to have some sort of authority: safeurl.com or something like that, that will be the place where to create a URL to share that will automatically check the URL for unwanted content and when people would see safeurl.com/?the_url everybody will know that the URL is verified by a higher authority and it is safe to click on ? that would simplify life for everyone
…On Aug 29, 2011, at 12:07 AM, nddrylliog wrote:
_sigh_
@RobertDoroftei if it's *.google.com then, yes, technically-aware
people will know it has to be googley somehow. HOWEVER, it's entirely
possible that non-technical people will consider 9sad8f.google.com
untrustworthy, considering they have no idea why stuff is separated by
dots anyway, and why order matters. People are much more likely to
ignore stuff on the right than on the left.
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 11:04 PM, RobertDoroftei
***@***.***
wrote:
> @nddrylliog
>
> this is not about scam, if you see 9sad8f.google.com/whatever/you/want/here probably you'll just ignore the whole string at the beginning, if the domain has weight then people are just taking for granted that it's not some trick to get into a scam of some sort.
> ##
>
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I'm @nddrylliog on GitHub
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thoughtful post, appreciate it. a few responses:
I would think that funnycatvideo.youtube.fi.gd/j2xn would be better
That's certainly one approach to take, and I can recognize how some people might tend to prefer that. I don't, but then again, that's why opinions are the way they are.
One thing I'll point out is, I really was building off the precedent that bitly (and others) set for vanity URLs (because I think that precedent makes sense), which is to put the useful alias descriptive vanity part as the first part of the path, immediately after the domain.
http://bit.ly/some-awesome-vanity-url
I'm not sure if bitly ever thought about
http://some-aweomse-vanity-url.bit.ly/
But they certainly don't have that as their approach right now. @goLookAt merely extends and tries to improve upon the idea that the content-path portion of the URL is the right place (and most semantic place) to describe what kind of content the URL will point to. I'm not a huge fan of ugly/non-sense looking sub-domains, BUT I think it's better than ugly/non-sense URLs which have no useful descriptive info.
That having been said, I'd encourage other experimentation in this area. Build a shortener that puts the vanity stuff into the sub-domain. That's fine by me.
The description of the content should be what the rest of the post is for
I disagree. I think that having descriptive text surrounding a link in a tweet, facebook/g+ post, etc is an excuse and fallback for having a crappy URL that doesn't speak for itself. The spirit of my experiment with @goLookAt is to make URLs which speak for themselves, so that you have less "noise" in the tweet, and more link. "/funny/cats/video" is shorter and more effective to describe the link that "this funny video about cats", because it removes the unnecessary grammatical structures, punctuation, etc.
if a user is going ot type it or share it with someone else, having a long URL isn't good
Again, I disagree. Having a longer URL is not necessarily bad. Most URLs are not re-typed. Even short URLs. Honestly, how many times have you seen a bit.ly URL like http://bit.ly/ab34ds3 and gone and re-typed that yourself? At worst, most people do copy-n-paste of such URLs to make sure they don't typo. And in better cases, such as how sharing happens on facebook, or native retweets in twitter, the "sharing" is completely digital and requires no textual interaction on your part at all. In all those cases, length of URL is much less relevant.
Besides the incredibly niche case of manually re-typing URLs, the only place where length of URL is relevant is if it busts your 140 characters in twitter. Luckily, twitter's mandatory t.co wrapping of all URLs means that no matter how long you make a @goLookAt URL, it only costs you 21 characters in your tweet.
Moreover, I've already shown how descriptive keywords in the URL lengthen the URL but actually shorten the overall tweet. And btw, I don't recommend people creating vanity URLs that are excessively long (the usefulness factor doesn't extend forever to the right in a URL). I recommend 2-3 short, desciptive keywords on the end of the URL, at most. Most of these URLs then end up being about 35-40 characters in length. That's certainly well within the limits of almost all mediums in which URLs are displayed and communicated.
A url should be to some extent bidirectionally unique
There's a whole industry of people who create unique URLs to the same content, for A/B testing, SEO, marketing campaigns, etc. I see nothing that suggests that we have to stay in an old-world mindset which restricts one-URL-one-resource. If 10 different people describe a site in 10 different ways, I actually think it's quite healthy to have the different links, with different meta data, as this feeds into the larger body of knowledge (meta-data) about a page, and it's gathered virally and crowd-sourced rather than automated via soul-less algorithms.
I prefer the real URL, #1
- Showing the real URL is important for the user, for 'security' reasons etc.
- I care more about the domain than the path.
- Being short is irrelevant for mum printing flyers, being typeable and obvious where it goes is relevant.
- One URL per resource please, most people don't A/B test their links.
How often do you ignore links because they use an URL shortener? I know I do, all the time, I simply assume that people using them on anything but twitter are hiding something, play with open cards if you want people to click. You cannot really provide both the shortened URL and the actual URL, since they can diverge after you present it, or due to more malicious issues, like someone presenting a link to hacker news to the client, and on the actual click provide goatse.cx, not very nice.
The domain is much more important than the path, it is verified to some extent, I know youtube is youtube, anyone can fake anything in the path without any technical knowledge.
Mum printing flyers might want a short url, but bit.ly/98af79 is not as typeable as mums-cookies.com/special-deal, even though it is much shorter. People might even remember it! Use nice URLs to begin with, don't try to get them via a shortener.
If you are A/B testing links to some third party, you are probably caring a bit too much about something that hardly matters. Try to improve your own pages instead of your links to someone elses.
@RobertDoroftei There is no such thing as "safe for everyone". For
example, I wouldn't be shocked at extreme furry porn. However, I would
be shocked by people failing to understand the distributed the nature
of the internet and pushing for centralized infrastructures such as
thelastshorteneryoulleverneed.com - well, what do you know. Also, this
is not about simplifying life. Being in a brainwave factory, being fed
uniform foodpaste via tubes would simplify a lot of lives - this
doesn't mean it is desirable.
On the same subject, read "Why I do not want to work at Google", a
piece by Kragen Javier Sitaker:
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000938.html
On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 8:12 AM, RobertDoroftei
[email protected]
wrote:
@nddrylliog
wouldn't it be great to have some sort of authority: safeurl.com or something like that, that will be the place where to create a URL to share that will automatically check the URL for unwanted content and when people would see safeurl.com/?the_url everybody will know that the URL is verified by a higher authority and it is safe to click on ? that would simplify life for everyone
On Aug 29, 2011, at 12:07 AM, nddrylliog wrote:
> _sigh_
>
> @RobertDoroftei if it's *.google.com then, yes, technically-aware
> people will know it has to be googley somehow. HOWEVER, it's entirely
> possible that non-technical people will consider 9sad8f.google.com
> untrustworthy, considering they have no idea why stuff is separated by
> dots anyway, and why order matters. People are much more likely to
> ignore stuff on the right than on the left.
>
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 11:04 PM, RobertDoroftei
> ***@***.***
> wrote:
>
> > @nddrylliog
> >
> > this is not about scam, if you see 9sad8f.google.com/whatever/you/want/here probably you'll just ignore the whole string at the beginning, if the domain has weight then people are just taking for granted that it's not some trick to get into a scam of some sort.
> > ##
> >
> > Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
> > https://gist.github.com/1176791
> ##
>
> Amos Wenger
> Crafting the future of Web Audio at ofmlabs.org
> I'm @nddrylliog on GitHub
> ##
>
> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
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Amos Wenger
Crafting the future of Web Audio at ofmlabs.org
I'm @nddrylliog on GitHub
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Likely #3
I never click YouTube URLs. I rarely click bit.ly URLs (for obvious reasons), but at least the URL in #3 is farely descriptive enough. In all honesty though, my bias against YouTube could be hindering accuracy in my vote. ;)
Truth is, who cares? URL shorteners are super useful, for more than just twitter. Imagine printing put flyers to hand to people... Asking someone to type in a very long URL is a terrible idea. (there are valid reasons for this, so changing the flow for the user is not alwas an option) on the otherhand a short URL with a descriptive path would be very useful.