URL Shorteners
Definition
A URL shortener is a service that maps a long web address to a short one, redirecting anyone who follows the short link to the original destination.
The Bee Analogy
Let us, for a moment, think of a field of flowers, each with a certain amount of pollen. We will call the flowers with the most pollen the most valuable. When a bee leaves the colony to find a flower, it must have some way of communicating how it got there once it returns to the hive.
Usually this communication takes the form of a dance, in which the bee shows other bees how to get to a specific field or flower. Afterwards the other bees follow the path and gain net resources for the hive, eventually exhausting the field of pollen, or value.
Twitter functions in a very similar way. Each person has a group of nearby bees with whom they can share valuable resources. The entirety of the internet is the world, and websites and articles are flowers. Those who use Twitter can communicate a valuable resource back to the hive by sharing a hyperlink — a shortened way of getting to a flower — with their network.
The hive-like architecture of Twitter allows information to flow very quickly, and the dance has become steadily more efficient. Instead of posting long URLs, the idea of the short URL or tiny URL emerged, allowing lengthy addresses to be compressed into a small space. These shorter URLs are a better fit for the 140-character cell that Twitter users live in.
History
TinyURL, launched by Kevin Gilbertson in January 2002, was the first widely used service and gave the practice its early generic name. The category expanded sharply after Twitter's launch, when the character limit made compression a functional necessity rather than a convenience: bit.ly appeared in 2008, alongside is.gd, ow.ly, goo.gl and many others. In 2010 Twitter began wrapping all posted links in its own t.co domain, making shortening automatic and invisible — and, not incidentally, routing every outbound click through Twitter's own measurement.
Consequences
The dance analogy holds for the mechanism but understates what the intermediary gains. A shortened link is not merely a compressed address; it is a redirect through a third party, and that has four consequences.
- Measurement. Every click passes through the shortener, which learns who followed what, when and from where. Link shortening turned informal sharing into an instrumented, analysable activity, and this — not brevity — is why commercial services offered it free.
- Opacity. A short URL conceals its destination, which removes the reader's ability to judge a link before following it and makes shorteners a durable instrument for phishing and malware distribution.
- Fragility. The link now depends on two services rather than one. When a shortener closes, every link it ever issued breaks at once, regardless of whether the destinations are still live. This has happened repeatedly, and the Archive Team's URLTeam project exists specifically to mirror shortener mappings before they disappear.
- Editorial control. The intermediary can, in principle, redirect, disable or log any link at any time.
