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URL (not URI) Shortening refers to the controversial practice of forwarding lengthy URLs via HTTP redirect from a shorter URL via a service.

Development of these services and this practice arose from the tendency of many websites to encode state information in URLs rendering them very long, aesthetically unacceptable, impossible to write down or read over the phone and easy to damage, such as by hard word-wrapping in Emails. The latter happens when E-mail clients or servers introduce line-breaks into the URL, since the line-breaks are characters, this constitutes introducing bad characters into the URL, invalidating it.

The URL shortening service creates a short "slug" of random characters that represents that whole URL, for example the URL for this page: http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Globally/dp/B003FSUDM4/ref=amb_link_353259562_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-10&pf_rd_r=11EYKTN682A79T370AM3&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1270985982&pf_rd_i=B002Y27P3M&tag=533633855-20 could be shortened to http://go.vistua.com/akbjb.

There are numerous URL shortening services, the most popular are http://is.gd and http://bit.ly and the original, http://tinyurl.com. Many URL shortening services are registered in ccTLDs such as .gd and .ly (Grenada and Lybia respectively) to further shorten the number of characters.

URL shortening is criticized for being abused, such as for the purpose of spam, or for deceiving users into visiting undesirable sites such as those with horrific content (please take great care before researching that topic).

A few of these services, most notably one offered by Digg "frame" a page rather than redirect to it. The once widespread technique of capturing an external webpage in an "HTML frame" in another webpage is fraught with unresolved legal problems. Digg's resurrection of the practice was poorly recieved. Owl.ly and some other services also do this. This practice confuses search engines and may be considered fraudulent.

Regardless, of these concerns URL shortening services are here to stay and serve many useful purposes, particularly in contexts where hard limits on message size exist, such as Twitter and SMS. Even the Vistua Network actually uses one internally.

Categories: Web, Internet

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