Stupid Link Tricks: A Daisy Chain of URL Shorteners

URL shortening service tinyURL apparently had an outage last week (fittingly, it was a short one). I don’t know how widespread it was, though there have previously been longer, systemwide outages.

Since tinyURL is Twitter‘s default URL shortener, it was immediately obvious. It was also annoying, as I urgently needed to know where in DC Angelina Jolie had been sighted, so I actually had to visit the main page of the Twitterer’s Web site and look for the item. Outrageous. (It was the lead story on the page. Still, it’s the principle.)

With Twitter, an URL shortener is pretty much a necessity (140 characters isn’t much room to work with), but it’s still something of a risk. Obviously, if the service goes down or goes under, you’re pretty much stuck, and if the surrounding text doesn’t offer context, the reader is also out of luck.

Also obviously, shortening the URL obscures the URL, which makes it a handy accomplice for phishing attacks or exposure to annoying memes and other general wastes of your time. Sure, there are URL expander services, but they’re a hassle — I wouldn’t be likely to use it unless auto short URL expansion was baked into whatever client I was using. Instead, I mostly rely on the surrounding descriptive text, and my impression of the sender — does this person have a good reputation for sending useful, interesting links?

Anyway, this prompted me to do some more thinking on URL shortening/clickthrough tracking sites, which led me to see just how long of an URL-shortened daisy chain I could make. I’m basically laundering a link through as many intermediaries as I could before I got bored (based off a list of URL-shortening sites compiled from Top 9 Free URL Shorteners, URL Shorteners, More URL Shorteners, Top 10 URL Shorteners and more.)

Here’s the final URL: Where does it go? You’ll have to click through to find out:

http://zi.ma/189faa

Trite, I know, but that was my point.

Here are the sites I used, in order — I decided to go alphabetically. All of the URL shortening sites worked as of the time I wrote this post. If any one of them fails, the final link, naturally, will break.

1. Ashorterlink became http://ashorterlink.com/5324

2. Bit.ly made it http://bit.ly/7k70s

3. BudURL (registration required; limit of 250 free URLs) transmogrified into http://budurl.com/hr9k

4. ChilpIt added a character to make it http://chilp.it/?3bda39

5. Cli.gs flipped it to http://cli.gs/LsANQA

6. Doiop.com became http://doiop.com/yatishorturl (I customized the alias, which was supposed to stand for Yet Another Short URL except my brain misfired and autofilled in YATI, from “Yet Another Trek Inconsistency.”)

7. DwarfURL turned into http://dwarfurl.com/a17ce

8. iDek morphed into http://idek.net/4KA

9. is.gd changed into http://is.gd/myUI

10. krz.ch Swissed into http://krz.ch/591b5d

11. My T URL was now http://myturl.com/0prNr

12. Not Long transported you to http://yatishorturl.notlong.com

13. Shlnk shortened back down to http://shlnk.com/ks

14. shorl (Note that it pauses here for a few seconds before it redirects) came up with the name-sounding http://shorl.com/rinahyrupita

15. Shortna.me produced http://shortna.me/b3de1

16. SnipURL snipped to http://snipurl.com/dgmev

17. urlShort lit over to http://u.mavrev.com/1xk7

18. zi.ma finally became http://zi.ma/189faa

A lot of work for a silly Rickroll.

There were a few notes. I’d originally started with adjix, except it directs you to a framed page to display an ad — since the video doesn’t autoplay if you’re running NoScript, I left it out.

Also, neither Metamark nor TinyURL (somewhat fittingly) would let me create the link, apparently not liking when I tried to redirect a redirect.

And I think I had MemURL in there somewhere originally, but left it out of the chain. I think.

Tellingly, there were a few sites that no longer worked from when I first started writing this a few days ago. There were also a few I was too lazy to register for.

What was the point of all this? No point, really — I fully expect the final link to not work within a short while, due to a break somewhere up in the chain. Just remember that whenever you use an URL shortening service, your link is in someone else’s hands, and that it’s probably best for time-limited, ephemeral stuff.

Any thoughts? Should I have tried to loop the chain back through itself a few times? Are we too reliant on third-party url-shortener/clickthrough metrics services? Leave a comment below.

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