[Hooch Tan]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109...g=2547-1_3-0-20

"Until a remote future arrives when Twitter and the telecommunications industry decide 140-character messages are too short, though, URL-shortening services aren't going to go away. Fortunately, their potential problems can mitigated through careful use, and newer services such as Bit.ly are being designed expressly to avoid the pitfalls. "

I remember when TinyURL came out.  At the time, I thought it was a nice idea, but of limited utility.  Now, with twitter and input constrained devices exploding in popularity, TinyURL and related services have become much more useful, but something inside my stomach churns when I think about them.  http://tinyurl.com/c2elgp just seems to be too cryptic to me.  I do not know where it goes and the security angel on my shoulder tells me that blindly going to a site is a bad idea.  Fortunately, many services are providing lots of tools and features to their shorteners that help address issues like search engine results, final destination, etc. but those all require extra hassles.  That extra layer, especially one that passes through a single company, is enough to make me not click on that link.  The one thing I do find interesting though, is that with all these services, as a business, real-time trending becomes possible.  Too bad I am not in a business that can take advantage of that.

[Hooch Tan]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109...g=2547-1_3-0-20

"Until a remote future arrives when Twitter and the telecommunications industry decide 140-character messages are too short, though, URL-shortening services aren't going to go away. Fortunately, their potential problems can mitigated through careful use, and newer services such as Bit.ly are being designed expressly to avoid the pitfalls. "

I remember when TinyURL came out.  At the time, I thought it was a nice idea, but of limited utility.  Now, with twitter and input constrained devices exploding in popularity, TinyURL and related services have become much more useful, but something inside my stomach churns when I think about them.  http://tinyurl.com/c2elgp just seems to be too cryptic to me.  I do not know where it goes and the security angel on my shoulder tells me that blindly going to a site is a bad idea.  Fortunately, many services are providing lots of tools and features to their shorteners that help address issues like search engine results, final destination, etc. but those all require extra hassles.  That extra layer, especially one that passes through a single company, is enough to make me not click on that link.  The one thing I do find interesting though, is that with all these services, as a business, real-time trending becomes possible.  Too bad I am not in a business that can take advantage of that.

[alanjrobertson]

Although the article mentioned adding a code to the TinyURL URL to see a preview of it they didn't mention there's also the capability to automatically expand ALL TinyURLs you click on - see http://tinyurl.com/preview.php. Obviously it isn't a panacea given the plethora of URL shortening services out there but at least it would make it easier to trust clicking on a large number of them!

[OSUKid7]

Check out http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2009/02/...hortened-urls/. I just started using the GreaseMonkey script in Firefox to expand these shortened URLs when I mouseover the link. Seems to work well for me.

That plus the great RefControl extension and the setting layout.css.visited_links_enabled to false take care of most of my current security concerns while browsing.

[Jason Dunn]

It's all about the source - if someone I know uses TinyURL to shorten a link, I'm not going to worry about it.