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
Excellent idea. Do It!!
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
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…
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.
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!
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/
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
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.
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.