Sneak is a fan of the helpful TinyURL service, which takes a long and unwieldy URL like, say, the following somewhat verbose example of the art of URL composition from Cisco: www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns339/ networking_solutions_small_medium_sized_business_home.html and turns it into something much handier, like tinyurl.com/4r3e7, which is absolutely vital for print publication.
The slight problem with TinyURL's approach is that it's a bit of a lucky dip from the end user perspective. You can't tell by looking that tinyurl.com/4r3e7 takes you to Cisco: it might just as easily take you to Phishing Attacks R US or Madame Sin's House of Hurt.
So there is a corresponding need for a rival service that offers some warning of the final destination. Which is just what the MakeAShorterLink service offers, displaying the target URL for a few seconds to give you the chance to opt out. The only problem? URLs like http://makeashorterlink.com/?A2FC535CA. Somewhere along the way, MakeAShorterLink seems to have forgotten that it would help - a lot - if its URLs were actually short.

29 Mar 2005