this is news?

I’ve avoided reading this post on the evils of url shorteners (like tinyurl and friends) ever since it appeared on reddit, hacker news, digg, etc. because it’s one of those posts that you can compose in your own mind just from reading the title.

But then the Freakonomics blog picked up the story, and I couldn’t resist, so I popped over and read it.

Yup, nothing new.

tinyurl has been a horrible abortion of an idea ever since it started. I’m not sure why it took 900 words to explain that anything that obscures what you’re actually clicking on is a bad idea. The physical equivalent would be allowing a random crackhead from 5th Ward to inject a mystery syringe into your body while saying, “trust me”.

But hey, if the entry leads to fewer people using tinyurl, I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

The more general principle here is that on the internet, indirection sucks. The whole point of the internet is to eliminate the middle-man, so any business model that tries to artificially insert itself between you and your information is doomed to failure. This fact, by the way, is why evites are tinyurl’s retarded, drooling step-brother.

By the way, I still read and write email on an 80 column screen.