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Is TinyURL Sustainable?

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

Comments

dino delellis	November 8, 2008 9:26 AM I was wondering about this myself. This means that they have to store all of these in a database ( 62 Million plus ) and that database and that website had better be up ALL the time or a significant small portion of the web becomes inaccessible. Perhaps, and or unless they are using Google's web service ( which almost can't go down ), one needs to be careful of the possible risk in putting critical company business or commercial affiliate links on tinyurl.com
confuscated	December 23, 2008 12:04 AM I wonder how tinyurl handles the possibility of two people using the same custom alias? Granted, the probability of this happening is probably rare, does it simply associate the custom alias(es) with their randomly generated tinyurl(s), much like a symbolic link?
Philip Machanick	January 18, 2009 11:24 PM confuscated: The tinyurl site checks if your custom alias is already in use and if so, offers you a random one or the option to try again. For example, I failed to create http://tinyurl.com/greenscool (taken) but http://tinyurl.com/TheAustralianLies wasn't. If you know anything about Australian Politics, you'll see the funny side of this ...
Jim Turner	February 6, 2009 11:31 AM I find it weird, though, that you can type in a random tinyurl and still hit a site pretty much every time. For example, do you think tinyurl generated "tinyurl/asshat" for someone? Because you hit a site with it. Seems strange.