Fun with TinyURL

Have you seen these ridiculously large URLs?

Have you seen these ridiculously large URLs? Just try linking to them. Yikes, good luck!

A link this big:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

Can be reduced into a link this small:

http://tinyurl.com/6

Isn’t that cool? It’s a free service called TinyURL. But the real fun is in guessing TinyURL addresses. It’s like the old Domain Game only more random, because you won’t know what’s behind each URL door, until you open it! Call them vanity TinyURLs, if you will.

To start, try your first name and then go from there. Here’s mine:

http://tinyurl.com/rob

Too funny! One might even be inclined to draw curious conclusions about such experiments. Hmm…

Here are my friends:

http://tinyurl.com/gabe

http://tinyurl.com/john

http://tinyurl.com/neil

Here’s a similar observation on a blog

http://akma.disseminary.org/archives/000961.html

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2 Comments

  1. Hey, that’s kind of cool! would be a good way to share URLs with less-computer literate friends.

    Sometimes I paste a lengthy URL into Outlook and it is delivered with linebreaks in the middle that confound some newbie computer users.

    Ron

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