If you haven’t heard of TinyURL yet, it’s one of the original URL shortening services that can take a really long URL and make it into a really short one. The link goes to their server and redirects to the actual destination. It’s handy for emailing long links which might get corrupted with word wraps, and I use it a lot when I post to Twitter to keep under the 140 character limit.
They’ve had this neat feature for a while where you can give your post a custom alias, which means, instead of http://tinyurl.com/d39dm you can have http://tinyurl.com/booger (I just typed those in the post editor, haven’t clicked on either, never will, totally made up examples, etc)
This morning I wanted to post a Tweet about a news story and I figured I’d give it a custom alias so followers would have a hint as to what it’s about. For reasons I’ll get to in a second, I won’t go into what the story was (you can follow me to find it, I suppose), but the alias I’d chosen was already taken. Since it was a pretty topical alias I typed it in to see if someone had found a better story.
Nope, it was porn.
That’s right, people are squatting on tinyURL aliases now. Cheaper and faster than registering domain names, I guess, and they don’t expire. I just wonder if that means that a lot of people are already typing in URLs on speculation to the service, or if it’s a trend that people on the edge have spotted. Since the link was to porn (hence the lack of an example), and porn is generally a leader when if comes to technology, there might be something to this.
Just in case: http://tinyurl.com/jasondoucette
