Setting up YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener
*Note: I grew impatient with the email I sent not loading so I'm posting this via the web interface. I'll delete the emailed post whenever it decides to make an appearance.*
I have some ideas for prototypes I would like to do around the emerging trend of URL shortening. It's a popular service for the Twitterati (myself included) for keeping our character count below the arbitrarily chosen 140. To that end, after much more frustration and headaches than it should have been, I installed an open-source URL shortening service called YOURLS on my personal web space. Since it is an open-source system, I'm going to try and dive into it and hack it apart the next few days to do the kinds of things I want. Here's my first shortened link using the service: http://kunaldpatel.com/yourl/1.
My main problem with URL shortening services is that, when we really think about it, their function is completely arbitrary. They move beyond shorthand or slangs we use for words or even addresses (ex. "13th Street and 5th Avenue" -> "13th & 5th") and obscure the address so that it is only machine-readable. When I look at a tinyurl, or a bit.ly link, or any of the others, I often have no idea where it could lead. While URL's are not a perfect address system (the inventor revealed recently that the second "/" in "http://" is totally useless, which amused me for some reason), domain names and other clues in URL's are our only context for knowing where we are going. Much like veteran New Yorkers can divine cross streets given a street address on an Avenue, a URL can reveal much about a link before one clicks on it. I have 2 ideas for projects in mind right now:
1) Create a URL shortening service that stores your URL, but returns back someone else's previously-shortened site. I read a blog post over break about the Kashiwa Mystery Cafe in Japan and it's been on my mind since then. What is unique about this cafe is that you get what the person before you ordered. The next person gets what you ordered. With the abstraction of URL links that occurs through shortening services, we put our faith in the system that it returns to us what we originally gave it. I think a shortening service that returned back what the last person shortened could be interesting along the same lines and a)inform users to not be so trusting of the service they use, and b) evoke curiosity and an emotional reaction over the swap. 2) Similar to the first idea, I would instead create a service that generated a "permanent" short URL for a group of people to share. Each a time a user in the group contributed a new link to this service, it would become the shortened URL, replacing whatever had previously been the link. For example, let's say I set up a shortened url called "this.is.awe.sm", then each day I could check it and it may be something different that one of my friends found particularly intriguing. I wouldn't know where I was going, or why, but I would trust their judgment of adding the link. The idea of 1 link and shifting destinations as a subversion of our typical expectations appeals to me. I'll start work on 1 if not both tomorrow, probably with some technical diagrams and research mapping out how I may do this, followed by some prototyping.