I really dislike tinyurl.com. It is a site which allows the user to basically create a Unix synonym. For those who don't know what that is, a user can enter a URL address for any site and tinyurl.com will generate a smaller, more compact URL which links to the original URL address.
I am not sure why anyone uses tinyurl.com. Do they really find long URLs that difficult? When you use tinyurl you are basically:
1. hiding the real location of where you are trying to send someone
2. giving up that user's internet habits since I am sure tinyurl has a bunch of tracking metrics encoded into the tinyurl.
I find it annoying whenever I see a tinyurl. I want to know where I am going, particualrly if the user didn't exactly disclose what the URL is. A description of "check this out" doesn't really tell me where the URL goes to. I do a lot of web surfing and I try to be careful about where I go and clicking on a url who's true location has been hidden is just asking for a lot of trouble.
Also, I find my privacy valuable. I don't need any more metrics collected on me than there already is (e.g. Google urchin trackers are everywhere now.)
2 comments:
TinyURL was primarily used for IM clients that had limitations to the length of the string that could be used for status
Sure that makes sense but now everyone uses them in things like blog postings, which don't have any such length restrictions!
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