TinyUrl, Whacked

October 27, 2003 11:29 PM

Tinyurl, Whacked. First there was GoogleWhacking. Now, via the address shortening service from TinyURL.com comes a new game, an entertaining and frightening view into the deranged minds of your fellow internet denizens. (more)
posted by iamck (17 comments total)

This is an example of why I'll never be famous on the Internet. When I first saw a tinyurl.com URL I did the same thing, tried out some other random URLs. Of course it seemed a mind-numbingly obvious thing to do, and held my interest for maybe 10 seconds, so I didn't put up a whole web page about it, and thereby missed my chance to have a post about my site on MetaFilter. Sigh.
posted by blm at 12:19 AM on October 28, 2003

I posted some amusing tinyURLs I found on my blog. I was quite surprised at the last two. Someone at tinyurl.com seems to have quite the sense of humour.

Anyone find any other surprises?
posted by antidigerati at 12:35 AM on October 28, 2003

Dork.
posted by eddydamascene at 12:46 AM on October 28, 2003

www.tinyurl.com/sexy
www.tinyurl.com/cunt

both SFW btw
posted by iamck at 12:48 AM on October 28, 2003

Ahhh. But what happens when you convert your Metafilter Number to Hexadecimal, and use that as the seed.
posted by seanyboy at 2:05 AM on October 28, 2003

According to the tinyURL engine, "hell" is a "spongebob squarepants" themed barbie doll. [shudders with the horror of it]
posted by seanyboy at 2:41 AM on October 28, 2003

Tinyurl and similar services are Bad!

You will have found this out for yourself if you've ever located exactly the newsgroup or forum post you need using a search engine, it's a year or two old, and it has a 'short' link in instead of proper one. The trail goes dead as soon as the short-link service ceases operation or refreshes its database.
posted by cell at 4:20 AM on October 28, 2003

Tinyurl and similar services are Bad
Unless you're an occasional web user, and the link somebody emailed you goes over two lines, and you don't have the technical nous to put the two lines back together.
posted by seanyboy at 5:14 AM on October 28, 2003

To make it easier, the url for this entry is tinyurl.com/snei
posted by sebas at 5:21 AM on October 28, 2003

Poop!
posted by RylandDotNet at 6:01 AM on October 28, 2003

But what happens when you convert your Metafilter Number to Hexadecimal

Or just spell out your username sequentially... here's the author of this post: iamck
posted by soyjoy at 7:12 AM on October 28, 2003

Like I need another way to discover random web links besides posts from crunchland, ed, madamjujujive, nthdegex...
posted by Tubes at 9:09 AM on October 28, 2003

tinyurl.com/me3(dia) links to a defensive message about inappropriate behavior on a chatboard. How boring.
posted by me3dia at 9:20 AM on October 28, 2003

http://tinyurl.com/o
http://tinyurl.com/o9
http://tinyurl.com/o9s
posted by O9scar at 10:01 AM on October 28, 2003

The unicycling links may (or may not) be thanks to this guy: unicyling.com.
posted by me3dia at 10:03 AM on October 28, 2003

the link somebody emailed you goes over two lines

But this won't happen if you surround the URL with angle braces. This is a far better solution than a URL redirection service.
posted by kindall at 10:11 AM on October 28, 2003

But this won't happen if you surround the URL with angle braces. This is a far better solution than a URL redirection service.

I do this, too, and unfortunately more than a few modern email readers don't respect that convention. Or, even if they do, people will still try to cut-and-paste, only grabbing one line.
posted by mkultra at 10:31 AM on October 28, 2003