Serendipity35

A post on the NYT's Bits technology blog titled "‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web" caught my attention because of the serendipity reference and because it referenced several URL-shortening services that I was researching online.

Bit.ly, the URL-shortening service, has people clicking millions of their links in social networks like Twitter and Facebook and e-mail. Last week, bit.ly processed 599,100,000 clicks, its highest number since starting in July 2008.

Many URLs now have multiple doppelgängers because of this aggregation of “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. Are we really all human aggregators now?

URL shorteners like bit.ly ow.ly tinyurl.com are getting a lot of traffic. (By the way, I am not a big fan of the .ly domains which is the Internet country code for Libya.) One reason for the popularity of these services is Twitter with its 140 character limit. Many site and blog URLs can easily eat up most or all of the 140 character limit if you want to add a link. The shorteners can knock it down to about 12 characters by providing a redirect.

One problem is that if one of these services goes away, it will leave behind all the redirects that have been created - which would be millions of links for any of the popular services.

People can also use these shortened links to disguise the destination of a link. If you wanted to find out about consumer services from the Better Business Bureau, I could send you to http://bit.ly/2V4GXo or to http://bit.ly/2V4GXo. They look pretty much the same and neither gives you a clue as to where you are headed. One of them does go to the BBB, the other goes to a store link.