Everybody Wants Short Links

See that URL up there on your browser? The one that’s super descriptive, yet so longer than one wants to deal with? The one breaks funny when you email your friend with the ancient mail client that somehow things that 80 characters is an appropriate width to break on? The one that we all feed into web shortening services like tinyurl.com so that we can add them to our Twits? The one that digg.com wants to replace with their URL-hiding top bar? Yeah, it’s long. In this case of this post, it’s 66 characters.

Really, short links are the ultimate in ugly URLs. Longer, more descriptive URLs are appreciated by both the 24 humans that pay attention to the location bar as well as to search engines. Just for the record, and before we go any further, let me just say that short links make my skin crawl. They’re icky. Gross. Blech. But, short links seem to have a purpose, and Twitter has really driven them into the limelight. So, it seems that we’re stuck with them.

The biggest problem with short links—at least ones not held by digg.com who have some sort of awful desire to mask the web all the sudden—is that there’s another naming and directory system in the mix and you are now depending on that service to stay up. Besides the indirection issues, TinyURL and their brethren might go down, however. Or go out of business. Or might just have network issues one day. Bam. All those short links suddenly could stop working for a while. Or for ever.

There’s been a bit of discussion that Google should just take over the short link business. They could, and they are pretty reliable. But, that just smacks of ick at some level. After all, a URL describes a resource on your site, not on Google. And that’s the second problem with link shorteners. They become faceless, anonymous tokens. We might as well start passing around IP addresses again for all the information they give us.

So, here’s a thought, and apparently it’s not a new one. Instead of relying on outside entities to shorten URLs, why can’t websites do it themselves? So many websites are managed by CMS or blog engine tools that it should be a freaking snap to implement. Let me show you an example. A proof of concept if you will. Here’s the URL for this blog entry:

http://duncandavidson.com/2009/04/everybody-wants-short-links.html

Here’s a quicky shorter link I just cooked up for this post:

http://duncandavidson.com/s/1

Try it. You’ll be right back here in no time. Cool huh?

Sure, duncandavidson.com isn’t as short as tinyurl.com, but you know what, it’s pretty close. And, it has a few features that I consider totally useful. First, it’s under my control, not some other service that might have an interruption, a bad day, or just decide to go foom. Second, you can look at the link and tell where you are going, unlike all those tinyurl.com links that take you to mysterious places that only reveal themselves once you’ve clicked on them.

Now, I haven’t hacked anything into MovableType for this particular proof of concept. This isn’t, however, a hard problem to tackle. All you need is a local look up table of some sort and a handler for /s/*, or whatever URL path scheme that works for your site. That handler can look things up on the fly and issue a permanent redirect on demand. Or, if you’re into static generation of your website, you could even have your software tool just emit the right lines into an .htaccess file or the like.

For this particular proof of concept, I took the easiest way out and tossed the following into my Apache configuration file to make this work. Here’s what it looks like:

# Sample short link
Redirect permanent /s/1 http://duncandavidson.com/2009/04/everybody-wants-short-links.html

I wouldn’t want to do this by hand for every entry, but you can see that it’s not a very hard thing to do. Easy in fact. Two bits of data. The short link identifier and the URL to send a browser along to.

Quite frankly, I won’t have time to really dink around with this idea at all for a few months. I’m just coming off a bad case of bronchitis and there’s this book I’m supposed to be writing right now (oh wait, did I really just say that out loud?) and I’m behind on all sorts of things. So, instead of doing anything constructive with code and getting too fancy, I’m taking the easy way out and just sharing the idea with the hope that maybe it’ll spark some useful discussion.

MovableType, WordPress, all you CMS vendors, Flickr, whoever. What do you say? Maybe we could overload that old # convention for the permalink to a fragment to use these super shorter links that whole lot more sense than http://tinyurl.com/ckto9r. Or maybe there could be a new convention. “SL” for short link. Or, maybe an HTML link tag that works like an RSS pointer or the like, but which has a short link relationship. Something like:

<link rel="short" href="http://duncandavidson.com/s/1"/>

Or maybe something like this does already exist and is just languishing in the relatively unimplemented which will come up in the comments. Regardless of implementation details, imagine a world where you see:

• http://bill.wordpress.com/s/2343
• http://flickr.com/s/2isA8
• http://facebook.com/s/AsdiFD

They’re still pretty ugly as far as URLs go, but, they’re better than any of the currently existing alternatives. And, there’s probably some considerations I’ve not thought through in the 12 minutes between the time I had the idea and started writing this blog post. Who knows. Think about it. But, for the love of URLs and the desire for short ones that lead to longer, more descriptive ones, could y’all please jump on something like this?

Or maybe, as Koz suggests, Twitter should just take care of all the shortening and lengthening for us and save us from the bane of short links infesting the web.

Update

As comments below attest, there has been some action on this front. Zeldman posted a twit a week or so ago with this exact thought, Flickr has short URLs, and things are happening with link tags, such as canonical and alternate shorter versions. Sam Ruby is talking about how all this interacts with HTML 5, and points to another shorturl link header proposal that looks perfect. There’s all sorts of stuff going on here!

Just goes to show that good ideas crop up all over the place. I should have assumed that when I had these thoughts, others were having them as well. I should have done a few searches, then point at their work and say “Do THAT!”.