URL shorteners (was: Re: ISNIC DNS)

[Nicholas Clark]

On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 02:56:33PM +0100, Dominic Humphries wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-05-08 at 13:01 +0100, Sam Kington wrote:
> > Getting off-topic here, but what use are URL shorteners now that Twitter converts all links to be t.co/blah ? They don't save you any space in tweets, and they obfuscate the URL you're linking to. Is link-tracking really that useful?
> 
> IRC? Links that take more than one line are annoying, and some even
> manage to hit the 512-character limit.

The mention of the new-fangled IRC thing made me wonder if anyone has been
perverse enough to create a link-shortener that serves things via gopher,
or some other quirky protocol.

Although I can see an immediate flaw in this plan - link shorteners rely
on HTTP redirection codes, which I think that most other protocols don't
have.

Meanwhile, Dave notes that this thread has going wildly off at a tangent from
the original problem - who to use to serve DNS for an Icelandic domain.

Nicholas Clark