Getting the whole picture
15/Jun/2009 19:04 Filed in: Other
It’s becoming more and more common when online to
come across cut down URL’s similar to http://tinyurl.com/pv9tge
provided by web sites like tinyurl.com. The idea is
that you paste any long and not so user
friendly URL into their online tool and they
provide you with a smaller one. This is
great for services such as twitter which only allows 140
characters per post and a URL you may want
to share via twitter could actually be
more that 140 characters. So I guess you
could say this is a great tool.
The only issue I have with these services is that potentially spammers and hackers could abuse these tools. My concern is that when you see one of these shortened URLs you have no way of deciding whether or not the link will take you to a safe website or not. For all you know the link could direct you to a web site that runs some dangerous script when you navigate to it.
It’s not all bad news, I was visiting the tinyurl.com site today and noticed they offer a ‘preview’ version of their URLS. Basically by appending preview to the beginning of the URL, instead of going direct to the destination you are take to the tinyurl.com site and notified the actual full URL so that you can decided to proceed to the site or not. The screen shot below shows the output from appending preview to the tinyurl example shown earlier, http://preview.tinyurl.com/pv9tge.
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The only issue I have with these services is that potentially spammers and hackers could abuse these tools. My concern is that when you see one of these shortened URLs you have no way of deciding whether or not the link will take you to a safe website or not. For all you know the link could direct you to a web site that runs some dangerous script when you navigate to it.
It’s not all bad news, I was visiting the tinyurl.com site today and noticed they offer a ‘preview’ version of their URLS. Basically by appending preview to the beginning of the URL, instead of going direct to the destination you are take to the tinyurl.com site and notified the actual full URL so that you can decided to proceed to the site or not. The screen shot below shows the output from appending preview to the tinyurl example shown earlier, http://preview.tinyurl.com/pv9tge.
As you can see from above http://tinyurl.com/pv9tge is actually safe and simply takes you to one of my previous blog postings. But at least by using this feature for any tinyurl.com urls you get you have the opportunity to decide for yourself.
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