TinyURL is an online service which provides short aliases to long URLs.

Service

The TinyURL website has a text box to enter a long URL. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its database and returns a short URL such as http://tinyurl.com/qb5yu. If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than creating a duplicate entry. The shorter URL is forwarded to the longer one.

Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they're easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit extremely bandwidth-limited media, like IRC channel topics or email signatures. Also some email clients impose a max length at which they automatically break lines requiring the user to paste together a long URL rather than just clicking on it. A short URL alias is much less likely to become broken.

Criticism

The very convenience offered by a TinyURL also introduces potential problems, which have led to criticism of the use of TinyURLs.

TinyURLs are opaque, hiding the ultimate destination from a web user. This can be used to unwittingly send people to sites that offend their sensibilities, or crash or compromise their computer using browser vulnerabilities. To help combat such abuse, TinyURL allows a user to set a cookie-based preference such that TinyURL stops at the TinyURL website, giving a preview of the final link, when that user clicks TinyURLs.

TinyURLs also introduce a dependency on a third-party service that may change, go away, or maintain privacy-compromising logs of user activity indefinitely.

Blacklisting

The use of TinyURLs in Wikipedia articles is deprecated. As of 2006-02-06, Wikipedia edits fail if a TinyURL hyperlink exists anywhere in the article (including links to http://tinyurl.com and http://www.tinyurl.com URLs).

Easter eggs

Some early TinyURL redirects which spelt out words were used as easter eggs.

http://tinyurl.com/dick and http://tinyurl.com/cunt link to the White House websites of Dick Cheney and Lynne Cheney. These two redirects now return a message stating: Notice from TinyURL admin: This TinyURL was created by a user of our service back when the creation of the IDs for the TinyURL were sequential and predictable. This TinyURL in no way represents the beliefs of the people who bring you the TinyURL service and we appoligize (sic) if this has brought offense to anyone.

Additionally, http://tinyurl.com/twat redirects to a photo of President George W. Bush, http://tinyurl.com/shit redirects to the Amazon listing for Ratchet & Clank, and http://tinyurl.com/pud redirects to the Microsoft Windows Messenger site.

See also

• HTTP URL aliasing

External links

• http://www.tinyurl.com - TinyURL
• TinyURL Creator - a Firefox extension that copies the TinyURL of the current address to the clipboard

Websites

Kurz-URL-Dienst