It took me long enough to read through my May issue, but in the Mac OSX Hints section, where they tell people how to do clever things and list undocumented keyboard shortcuts and things, the first topic this month was “Send long URLs via E-mail.”
Most of this “hint” involved explaining at a newbie level how to insert a hyperlink into a rich-text email message so it won’t have problems with line-breakage. If you don’t want to use rich text, it then suggests using angle brackets (<>) at each end. Never tried this, but the instructions are for Mac Mail, which I don’t use anyway. They’re always listing hints for Mac Mail and iCal, when I use Entourage. How about more hints for me?
Anyway, after that it says:
“If neither of those methods works, visit a Web site that converts long, messy URLs into short ones--TinyURL.com is one good example. Past your long URL into TinyURL.com’s text field, and then click on the Make TinyUrl button The site will produce a short reference URL–for example, http://tinyurl.com/27ghfn--that most e-mail clients won’t need to break.”
TinyURL is Gilby’s money-making creation, which in theory helps pay for this web site. I don’t know how he does it, but kudos for getting more TinyUrl press!
All the ads on the right. Google’s Adsense pays a small bit of money for each hit to the site. The amount is based on how many hits the site gets and some other stuff. http://adsense.google.com
I believe he also makes corporate versions of TinyURL to be used by various companies. Not sure what the difference is, though it could include private databases and other details.
If he chose to harvest the data of all the thousands of URLs passing through TinyURL, there is potentially a very big market for that information. But it may not fit well with Gilby’s ideas of free use of information and resources on the Internet.
The only problem with tinyURL is that you don’t know where you are going when you click on it.
Unless you look at the bottom left of your webbrowser, or the hyper link text is changed to say where its taking you!
Otherwise, its great.
TinyURL now has a preview feature. You can enable the automatic preview by enabling the cookie from the link or by adding the subdomain preview to the link (e.g. http://preview.tinyurl.com/27ghfn) to turn an existing link into a preview link.