[Foundation-l] Shorter Url for non-latin languages

[Alison M. Wheeler]

I'm not following exactly who said 
> > A URL shortener is a very good idea.
but I must firmly agree.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:56 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> It largely depends on what the use-case for having such a short URL is
> going to be and how many costs are worth those benefits. The use-cases 
> still seem rather confined to me, while the overhead to setting up and
> maintaining such a service is not negligible.

Twitter and its ilk (identi.ca etc) have set an expectation that people can communicate in 140 characters* and if a user currently wants to point to an article / version of ours then they will already be using a shortening service outwith our control. The use case is already well-defined and in use.

We can't stop them doing so, but we could assist them and, in so doing, improve our services.

As David and others have pointed out, if other services continue to provide this service then they get to capture information about what is 'hot', and if they go under the links become worthless. This applies even if the world has moved on (ime most short links have a lifetime measured in weeks or even days).

As regards setting up and maintaining such a service I am happy to say that the cost *is* entirely negligible. Because I was loathe to let some search engine see what targets I was storing (and because other people's sites do disappear) I wrote my own some time back. Didn't take too long and - unlike the bit.ly's of this world - when a link target is submitted it first checks if it already exists, thus removing the duplication which is so common amongst current services.

I'd be happy to make the code open (CC-BY or GPL3 probably), but it isn't that difficult, or expensive in processing / storage terms.

An alternative would be to create the link (in effect an unlabelled redirect) from a short domain (http://wp.wmf would be nice!) for every page and revision automatically, and include it on the page, thus saving on any database requirement because of the 1:1 matching.

The best option, naturally, would be to get Twitter and everyone else to accept "[[target]]" as an automated link! (but that would still be really too long for most pages)

Alison


* UTF codepoints, to be precise