The Battle Between Short Link Vs. Long Link

How can you type this domain in the address bar on your browser?

This is the world longest domain (Total 67 characters = 63 characters + 4 characters for .com). Is it easy? I say No and I think you do either.

There are even longer, more difficult links than this one, and sharing or telling others these links is likely putting the recipients to torture. I must be grateful to link shorten services like TinyUrl.com or IS.GD because they make these links portable and friendly to readers and of course easier to send via internet or write on a paper.

That’s why many newspapers and magazines now always shorten the links before publishing. Other services which limit the number of characters also welcome shorten links because it saves space for other contents (e.g. micro-blogging service like Twitter – 140 characters per message only; SMS – 160 characters per message only).

Besides the benefit, shorten links also bring us the inconvenience. We are really afraid of clicking on a link that we don’t know where it will bring us to. Maybe it will be a page includes malwares or a yucky page with porn images.

One of the disadvantage of shorten links is that they are used to lure readers by spammers. There are many forums and websites block specific domains which are suspected as spam sites. The tactic of stubborn spammers is to bypass the filter of these sites by changing their domains into other domains using shorten links. (e.g. www.spammers.com is blocked, they will change it to http://is.gd/xxxxxx and it will bypass the filter without any effort).

Consequently, there are several ways were born to overcome this disadvantage of shorten links:

Preview the shorten link:

Instead of redirecting you to the target link, you just go to a page shows you the real link.

If the link is shorten by TinyUrl.com, you can preview the target link by easily adding “preview” at the begin of the link (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/a9bpds --> http://preview.tinyurl.com/a9bpds)

Or the link is shorten by is.gd, you can preview the real link by adding the hyphen “-“ at the end of the link (e.g. http://is.gd/dFTM --> http://is.gd/dFTM- )

Show the real links instead of shortened links on browsers:

Long URL Please is an experimental extension for Firefox that automatically converts shortened links to the real links. If Firefox is not your favorite browser, you can use a bookmarklet instead (save a JavaScript code as a item in your bookmark toolbar, when you click on this item, the script will be executed)

Note: because this extension is still in experimental stage, so that you have to register an account on Mozilla.com and log in to install this extension for your Firefox.