Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Short URLs are so 2008. Long URLs for the win!



Do you find it annoying when you receive URLs which are completely meaningless? http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10191283-93.html? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7894516.stm? http://books.slashdot.org/books/09/02/18/1423251.shtml? http://bit.ly/GH4Cn?



How many times have you clicked on a link and would've known from the web page's title that it's not of interest to you or that you've even read it already? That happens a lot to me and so I present the solution: longr.us.



It's simple: You enter a website, and get a URL that contains the page's domain name, title and optionally an excerpt of its content. If you now share that descriptive URL the recipients will me much happier receiving it instead of the cryptic original URL.



The URLs above will be converted to these much more descriptive URLs:




Also, everybody seems to create URL shortening services at the moment. A URL enlarging service is just the next logical step!



Summary: Descriptive URLs are nice, but unfortunately not every website uses them. longr.us fixes that.



Oh, by the way, there is a bookmarklet for the service, too: Long "R" Us