Why Short Links Are Fantastic

Behold. An email that would be horrific to type.

sOmEdUdEwItHaLaWnMoWeR@companyzwizanameThatisntsogreatman.com

(Disclaimer: not a real email)

How good are you with a keyboard? Could you type that first try without an error?

Don't even get me started on links.

What about this one?

https://somzedudEz-and-a-biznez.com/so-me-path-with-thingsthatyouneedtotype?q=p&2=1&seven=7#hello

That's going to take all afternoon.

So these are jokes and not real locations on the web. But they could be! And there are real locations with links that are WAY worse.

What if you want to share such a thing with a friend!? What if that friend happens to be in real life... where you can't necessarily text or CTRL+C & CTRL+V to send them the link? (You do have real life friends, right?)

Anyways. Short links are pretty fantastic. You set them up and make them pretty nice (i.e. fizz.ly/x/something-nice) and then folks type it into their browser!

That's when the magic happens. BAM. They get "redirected" (technical term for "these are not the droids you are looking for") to wherever on the web you want them to go!

Pretty sweet right? If you haven't done it before, give it a shot!

If you have, maybe you know about some of the risks of short links... (seems like the kind of thing hackers might like, doesn't it?).

In any case, we are building an open source solution to reduce these risks and make the world a bit more secure.

And if we're successful... a bit more fun while we're at it.