What’s the deal with this stupid service? How do we share URLs with other people? Copy and paste. Does it matter at all how long it is? Absolutely not, in my opinion, but you’ll see people use it a lot.
Now, maybe there are message boards where they can’t accept a long url (I don’t believe this to be true) but other than that I can’t see it. Sure it’s nice to have a smaller URL, but on the other hand it sucks not being able to see where you’re going.
When I run into a tiny url like, I’m probably 50 percent less likely to click it unless the author describes what it is.
I don’t click blind on the internet.
Is there really a legitimate use for these other than “I don’t like the way long urls look”?
Believe it, it exists. While wedding planning, I got sucked into the boards on theknot.com, and now maintain my level of addiction on thenest.com. Any time I want to do any link to anything, I must convert it to a tinyurl first. BLECH.
As for your issue of not knowing what you’re clicking on, there’s now the option to do a tinyurl with preview- if you hover over the tinyurl or something like that, the real link will show.
The preview involves setting that preference at the tinyurl site and it will bounce you there first and show you the real link. This is nice when IRC buddies try to pull a goatse or tubgirl. Nice.
I post on one MB where long links screw up the formatting horribly. The convention there is to tinyurl them because one person who likes to offer free advice tells all the newbies to do that. No amount of countering by pointing out the fricking code to shove stuff into a formatted URL will stop this apparently. It drives me batty. Pit level swearing and everything batty. Which just goes to show that I’m a trifle unbalanced.
I use Tiny URL when sending a long URL to certain people (my mom, a particular friend of mine, a mailing list I have belonged to for years and years) because there really are quite a few people too dumb to realize that the reason a long URL I’ve sent them won’t work is because their mail client has inserted line breaks in it, and not because I’ve sent them the wrong URL.
Also with message boards, it’s pretty common both for people to want to link something in their sig or use an image file, and for the board to have a character limit on signatures. Tiny URL helps get around that issue, which is especially useful for images used as links.
Large urls break the formatting on a lot of message boards. They can even introduce the dreaded horizontal scrollbar for the entire page, which can make it nearly impossible to read.
Now you don’t have to do that. The person who creates the tinyurl can just put “preview.” before “tinyurl.com/whatever” and it’ll go to the preview. If they haven’t done that, you can do it yourself by copying the tinyurl to the address bar and adding the “preview.” yourself.
E-mail. Often, e-mail breaks long links as part of the page formatting. When you click, the link fails and you have to carefully add the rest. TinyURL prevents this.