Dell's TinyURL Finds a Porn Star Guru: Fun With Redirects

Affiliates are the first beneficiaries of custom TinyURLs. Earlier this month, the link shortening service, TinyURL.com, added the capability to customize a URL, effectively letting you replace the usual nonsensical combination of letters and numbers with real words - a long overdue feature which had already been adopted by other services, including bit.ly. At the time, in my coverage of the news, I said it would help people trust URLs, rather than finding themselves sent to a malware site. But, as he commonly does, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks accurately picked apart my theory, correctly saying that despite the customization options, readers could still point any old URL to any old site. (See: TinyURL Adds Custom URLs; Is This Exciting or What?)

Despite my best intentions, Allen was right and I was wrong. So, eager to lead with my chin again, I thought I'd learn from Allen's guidance and see how well brands did in securing their own names, or if smart squatters grabbed hot brand names to hijack traffic. Here are a few I checked out.

TinyURL	Actual URL
http://www.tinyurl.com/amazon	http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=917
http://www.tinyurl.com/bestbuy	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=bestbuy (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/centernetworks	http://www.centernetworks.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/dell	http://www.pornstarguru.com/page.php? x=183137&m=1
http://www.tinyurl.com/digg	http://www.digg.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/facebook	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=facebook (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/friendfeed	http://friendfeed.com/jigarme
http://www.tinyurl.com/fujitsu	http://www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/Consumer.php (Custom referral by Affiliate)
http://www.tinyurl.com/google	http://www.google.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/hitachi	http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/ menuitem.8027a91c954924ae4bda9f30eac4f0a0/
http://www.tinyurl.com/ibm	http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2002 /jun/28varma.htm
http://www.tinyurl.com/iphone	http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/03/international-iphone-pricing-guide/
http://www.tinyurl.com/linkedin	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=linkedin (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/mashable	http://www.sedoparking.com/ wwwtext-link-ads.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/microsoft	http://www.microsoft.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/myspace	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=myspace (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/orkut	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=orkut (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/reddit	http://www.reddit.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/rediff	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=rediff (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/socialthing	http://www.friendfeed.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/stumbleupon	http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8 &keywords=stumbleupon (Custom referral by techlist.com)
http://www.tinyurl.com/techcrunch	http://www.techmeme.com
http://www.tinyurl.com/techmeme	http://www.bitgain.com/techmeme
http://www.tinyurl.com/valleywag	http://valleywag.com/5024969/viacom-unleashes-pr -thunder-on-san-franciscos-press-corps
http://www.tinyurl.com/yahoo	http://www.creators.com/comics_show.cfm?comicname=oc
http://www.tinyurl.com/youtube	http://www.youtube.com

As you can see, entrepreneurial Amazon.com affiliates grabbed the aliases for a number of tech sites, from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace to Best Buy. Clicking these undoubtedly gives the squatter a kick-back if you purchase any of the books from Amazon.com, so watch your cookies. Some other folks clearly thought it was funny to point the TechCrunch alias to Techmeme, and another from SocialThing to FriendFeed. Meanwhile, Jigar Mehta is the "lucky" recipient of the FriendFeed TinyURL himself.

Brands that did manage to get their own TinyURLs in time included Digg, Google and Microsoft, while interestingly, TinyURL didn't have any information on Apple, Blackberry or others, neither offering the ability to create a new URL with those aliases, or to preview them, so they appear to have been whacked from the database. I had naively hoped that by opening up custom TinyURLs, people could increase their trust of these Web shortcuts, and I've been using them myself to announce new posts, but for the typical cyber scammers out there, it just opened up a new field of opportunity for redirection and annoyance. It's no wonder that Edelman's Steve Rubel sent an internal note to the company telling the PR agency to warn clients and get them to snap up their own TinyURLs before it was too late.

TinyURL Adds Custom Alias Feature To Shortened URL Service

The URL shortening service TinyURL was first useful for sending longer URLs to friends over e-mail to avoid line breaks that would often disable links in many e-mail programs.

With the advent and massive growth of SMS and microblogging services, like Twitter, TinyURL and other services like it have become omnipresent, an integral part of sharing blog posts, news, and other items.

In fact, Steve Gillmor of TechCrunch recently wrote, "Who controls TinyURL... controls the high ground in the battle for the Internet platform."

But until Friday, the URL was always a string of gibberish, a simple link to tinyurl.com followed by an indecipherable string of letters and numbers. You typically had to trust the person or service sending the TinyURL, or preview it to be sure you weren't being sent to a Rick Astley music video or a malware site.


Now, TinyURL added a new wrinkle, the ability to make a custom alias for any shortened URL you make, making it just as easy for people to read as Web browsers. Now, instead of always showing links to my blog posts that read as http://tinyurl.com/55aml3 or http://tinyurl.com/6px3kc, I could in theory, make them read like: http://tinyurl.com/lg70508 or http://tinyurl.com/tweetdeck.


This might seem like a small update, and it is, but it could make the service more mainstream, especially in the enterprise where slower adopters are more comfortable sharing items that are branded, or in a consistent format. It could also be another step in helping TinyURL compete with smaller URL shortening sites, including Snurl. With the exception of automated TinyURLs generated from TwitterFeed, I'll be trying to make my own custom aliases to links I share via Twitter, E-mail, or FriendFeed.