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June
18
2007
3:05 pm
mrBen
Tags:
Internet
mrBen
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QuickURL (TM)

TinyURL is great. It’s a wonderful service that replaces a really, really long URL, with an itty-bitty URL. For those of us who live online in IM, IRC and forums, it makes life a lot easier.

But. (There’s always a but)

It’s a bit crap for people who talk on the phone, or who present podcasts. So I present my latest technology demo, QuickURL, which creates tiny URLs with real words. (It’s currently limited to the 24,143 words in the dictionary between 4 and 7 characters long, but this is just a demo ;) ). Admittedly, the rest of the url is a bit of a pain, but I reckon that quickurl.com/codfish/ (should I buy the domain) is better in conversation than tinyurl.com/?ahd73h

mrBen

9 Comments. | show comments »
June
18
2007
3:38 pm
Type:
Comment
davee

Excellent idea. Do It!! :-)

June
18
2007
3:44 pm
Type:
Comment
Nicholas Butler

These things must be getting the next big thing then, since I was just playing with http://cl1p.net/ which provides a clipboard space like pastebin but without the archives

June
19
2007
10:24 am
Type:
Comment
Aq

If you’re prepared to have seven letters in a word, why not allow a
tinyurl to have up to three words, with up to 3 chars in the first and
up to 2 chars in the second two? According to
/usr/share/dict/british-english, there are 1071 1, 2, or 3 char words,
and 234 1 or 2 char words. So…allow a quickurl (which should be qurl
or something short, incidentally), to be something like
qurl.com/catanmy (i.e., cat, an, my) and 1071 * 234 * 234 = 58 million
possible URLs before you have to look to extending it to three-char
words in the first two positions…

June
19
2007
11:54 am
Type:
Comment
kNo'

for more readability I guess you could separate words with “-”, rather.
I told you on IRC, but when it’s written, it’s better : try to check for duplicates before assigning another word (or word combination) to a URL that is already existing IN UR DATABAZE (sorry).
You have a limited amount of words available, don’t waste them.

And, as I suggested, you might try out foreign words for foreign users.

June
20
2007
1:01 am
Type:
Comment
Phil Crissman

Hrm. I tried “http://www.philcrissman.com/2007/06/18/getting-things-done-revisited/” and got only a 404 (well, a debug page titled 404)… something wrong?

That being said; cool idea!

June
20
2007
5:44 am
Type:
Comment
mrBen

Hi Phil – I’ve been moving it all to http://linkpot.net which may have caused a routing problem with the old site. I tried your URL there and it worked – http://linkpot.net/abreast/

June
20
2007
5:50 am
Type:
Comment
mrBen

Phil – yeah – it was a problem with the move – I’ve now put a redirect in so that http://django.misterben.org.uk/quickurl redirects fully to http://linkpot.net

July
6
2007
4:54 pm
Type:
Comment
Mark Harrison

Look, this idea is so close to BRILLIANT that you have to run (don’t walk) and register quickurl.com

The thing that would be even better would be if you could parse the first 100 words of the site being linked to (or the meta in the head?) and substitute a meaningful word.

So that, instead of linking to http://www.mysite.com/rambles/aardvarks_on_toast_are_really tasty_with_pepper.php to quickurl.com/envelope… it was linked to quickurl.com/aardvark

Heh, presto, quickurl that is human readable AND meaningful (at least in part.)

Combine that with the suggestions above about multiple words, and I think you’re onto a winner.

July
10
2007
10:41 am
Type:
Comment
mrBen

Sadly quickurl was taken, so linkpot.net is the new name. I won’t be doing word parsing for 1 simple reason – I’m greedy ;) One of the ideas I have for commercialising the tool is to allow people to purchase words. If I did a word parse, then it would be easy for people to force which word they wanted, which wouldn’t be good.

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