I often forget to TinyUrlise hyperlinks I send to people, so I'm proposing an add on to email clients which does this for you.
Basically, you send an email as normal, the email client checks for hyperlinks and when it finds one, checks to see whether it's a snipurl or tinyurl, if not, it goes away and grabs a TinyURL for your long url and inserts this into your email (for avoidance of confusion, it leaves the long url in the document, but puts it in brackets afterwards).
-- neilp, Dec 03 2004

TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/
how come tinyurl doesn't have a shorter URL [neilp, Dec 03 2004]

snipurl http://snipurl.com/
another thing like tinyurl [neilp, Dec 03 2004]

(?) makeashorterlink http://www.makeashorterlink.com/
...and you thought tinyurl had a long domain name. [st3f, Dec 06 2004]

If the recipient has trouble with URLs, wouldn't it be easier to fix this in the recipient?
-- jutta, Dec 03 2004


[+] great one. [jutta]-if you did it on the recipient side, you may be doing it 10x more than you need.

The only drawback I see is that such overuse would lead to no longer "tiny" URLs, as all the short ones are used up. And, given how much email traffic there is, it could end up being a DDOS attack on poor little tinyurl.com.
-- sophocles, Dec 03 2004


hey [Jutta], I thought TinyURL was for well meaning senders to save recipients the trouble?
-- neilp, Dec 05 2004


Though, I thought they were great at first, the problem I have with the URL shortening systems is that it's too easy for an evil doer to mask a nefarious destination. I like to see where I'm going.
-- bristolz, Dec 05 2004


I worry that. Well, I do just worry alot. On topic, I haven't experimented with TinyURL, but I have a mail client that doesn't render all URLs well now. Are browsers that don't display an HTML-style hyperlink able to call a URL as composted by TinyURL?
-- reensure, Dec 05 2004


hi [reensure] the problem with most clients (especially my webmail one) is the wrapping of long URLs so they're no longer on one line.
[Bris] maybe there could be a server side TinyURL so you could have (e.g.) http://www.halfbakery.com /rT6WCd instead of a longer URL (presumably you'd trust a particular domain (or not)).
-- neilp, Dec 05 2004


[sophocles] points out the obvious drawback - could TinyURL cope? If a business model could be made for TinyURL to generate income (without too much in the way of annoying ads) from this, they could get sufficient bandwith for the demand, which would IMHO be huge. They could then distribute an Outlook/Outlook Express/Eudora plug-in to execute this. There is little danger of running out of TinyURL's. Using a relatively short twelve character alphabetical code would give you 95,428,956,661,682,176 addresses. You get my morning croissant.
-- wagster, Dec 06 2004



random, halfbakery