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He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Stupid.ly

Stupid.ly

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The Libyan government owns the .ly Internet country code, and since they don’t like pr0n, they took down Violet Blue’s url-shortening domain, vb.ly. Mittens, who was using mitt.ly, dropped it like a hot potato once he realized that it was subject to Sharia law and/or the whims of Muammar al-Gaddafi.

The whole URL shortener phenomenon, which is driven by Twitter’s 140 character tweet limit, has led to all kinds of unholy alliances driven by the ability to create a memorable URL from a country code. bit.ly is one of the biggest, and it’s also registered in Libya. The New York Times shortener, ti.ms, is registered in Monserrat, go.to uses a Tongo registrar, and is.gd is registered in Grenada.

URL shorteners are a necessary evil on Twitter, but they were starting to be used in the rest of the Internet because they allow the person making the link to track the number of times it was clicked. I don’t like them, because they make it impossible to know what site you’re visiting without actually clicking on the link. I hope the dawning realization that they exist at the pleasure of some pretty sketchy governments will keep them in Twitter where they belong.

Reader Interactions

24Comments

  2. 2.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    One of the older and more popular URL-only warez sites uses the Tongo registrar. The guy moves it around regularly and posts the current addy at his forum. They keep trying to shut him down and have yet to succeed.

  3. 3.

    Bijan Parsia

    Actually, URL shorteners well predates Twitter, see makeashorterlink and tinyurl.com. Indeed, tinyurl pimps URL shortenting for email communication.

    (No doubt that Twitter drives a lot of use of them these days. But there’s lots of reasons to want to use short urls including click tracking and just convenience. I sometimes pass out bit.ly URLs to my own pages, e.g., to students, because I want the canonical URL to be semantically clear and that makes it a bit long.)

  7. 7.

    Herb

    I don’t like them, because they make it impossible to know what site you’re visiting without actually clicking on the link.

    Actually many shorteners provide ways for you to preview the link before browsing to it.

    Click to preview: http://is.gd/fPz68-
    Click to browse: http://is.gd/fPz68

  8. 8.

    Punchy

    You watch — during the debates, Palin or Gringrich will point to this as evidence of Mitt being in bed fucking gay Democratic terrorists.

  9. 9.

    mistermix

    @Herb: Yeah, but I’d rather just float my pointer over the URL to see what it is.

    I’ve used the Chromed Bird twitter extension for Chrome and it will preview shortened links automatically, which is helpful.

  10. 10.

    Trinity

    I’m with you mistermix. I don’t click on bit.ly links because I like to know where I am going.

    And Mittens is an idiot.

  11. 11.

    Kirk Spencer

    @Bijan Parsia: Agreed. And I’ve used tinyurl for years, mostly for email.

    Sure, if you’re using html based email you /can/ make linked titles. Most people don’t, however, and instead send these three to four line links that don’t work because of page breaks on email. Nevermind the people avoiding html based mail to avoid the various problems. (Ever get one of the screaming holiday cards? Ever get one that has so much going on it locks up your computer? That’s when I committed to text based mail.)

  12. 12.

    Ginger Yellow

    They’re not great as hyperlinks, but they’re useful if you’re a print newspaper, for example, and want to provide links to useful context/documents in an article. Realistically, nobody’s going to copy out a massive URL, but a shortened one is feasible.

  13. 13.

    jimBOB

    I’ve been using tinyurl for years with humongous links, just as a way to avoid problems. If you are putting a link into a blog post, the nicest way to give your users a sniff of what’s in the link is to blockquote out a piece of it as a teaser.

    Don’t use twitter. Aside from disliking the implication that its users are twits, if what I say is that short, it’s probably not worth reading. Most tweets I’ve ever seen certainly weren’t. They remind me of the kinds of postings you see in brainless threads where everyone posts single-sentence bits of meaningless snark.

  15. 15.

    Origuy

    What’s “sketchy” about most of those governments? Libya, okay, Gaddafi is a nut, but Grenada, Tonga (not Tongo), and Montserrat are just small islands with more or less democratic governments. Montserrat in particular needs the income since half the island was devastated by a volcano and most of the people are refugees.

    Domain names are the modern version of collectible postage stamps, which used to be a major source of income for tiny countries.

  19. 19.

    Sentient Puddle

    In the pre-Twitter days, I used them fairly frequently and found them useful. I think part of it was that they were obscure enough that the only people I knew using them really did see them as tools and didn’t try to use them maliciously.

    It was also a day and age when forums and crap didn’t really have great support for HTML or other markup stuff. If you can plop down a href with brackets in whatever you’re writing these days, you shouldn’t be using URL shorteners.

    (Looking at the Wonkbook, Ezra)

  21. 21.

    Belvoir

    Have you ever heard of the Shady URL Generator? It’s kind of funny- you type in an innocuous URL and it will give it a suspicious -sounding link.

    “Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening!”

    http://www.shadyurl.com

  22. 22.

    Cris

    1. I like the fact that a shortened URL is persistent, so you can even learn to recognize common ones, such as http://tinyurl.com/y8ufsnp .

    2. The grandaddy of country code tlds has to be Christmas Island, whose nic once hosted the legendary goatse.cx.

  23. 23.

    BruceJ

    Tinyurl has long offered a preview link, and Tinyurl is based here, in the US; no nonsense about routing all your traffic via third-world registrars.

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