How Does TinyURL Work?
February 12, 2008 at 2:00 pm by Chris
Using Twitter would be next to impossible without TinyURL being built in. If you don't know what TinyURL is, it is a service that converts long URLs into short ones by creating an alias for your request. How it works is actually pretty simple. But, what I wondered is how a service like this, assuming growing popularity, could sustain itself. Wouldn't the URLs they create have to get less tiny over time? The answer turns out to be yes, but... not so much.Currently, TinyURLs are composed of six alpha or numeric characters attached to the TinyURL domain name. For example, the TinyURL for this post (I just created it) is http://tinyurl.com/2j2xr9. Because there are 36 different options (26 letters plus 10 numbers) for each character in the alias, TinyURL has up to 2,176,782,336 aliases to work with until they'll need to start using 7 characters instead of 6. According to their website, they've made more than 62 million of them so far, so it will be a while until we see that 7th character show up in our TinyURL's. After that, it will be even longer until we see 8 characters (78,364,164,096 more URL's, to be precise)... Do I have that math right? If not, I can at least pass some of the blame off on to Eric, who just figured this out with me. |
Tags: social-media software technology google
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