Are URL Shorteners Bad for the Web?
It never occurred to me that there could be anything negative about short URLs until I read this piece in GigaOM. The most prominent voice raising concerns about URL shorteners is DeWitt Clinton who is, surprisingly, not the former mayor of New York City, but an engineer on the Google Buzz team. Clinton says,
“Deployments of a large-scale URL rewriting proxies impact that ecosystem at the most fundamental level, making it more difficult for users and machines alike to predict what happens when a link is followed.”
But what if you could have a visible shortened URL, but when you hovered over it, you would see the long URL from which it was derived? Then users would have a better chance at being able to predict what happens when they follow the link.
I made a simple example at http://tinpanvalley.com/bitly. When you hover over the short url, it uses the bit.ly API to fetch the long URL, then it puts the long URL into the title attribute of the <a> tag, so that when you hover over the short URL, you see the long URL.
It would be cool if this feature were built into browsers in the future. There would be some hurdles like determining if the url shortener eve has an API that allows you to look up the long URL. Maybe this phenomenon will make its way into the specification for a future version of HTML.
Until then, I’m thinking of making this into a browser add-on that you can download so the hover capability always works on your browser. Stay tuned.
Update: with a little searching, looks like other people have done this with greasemonkey scripts, etc.
