More and more sites today are using Link Shortening services such as

• is.gd
• bit.ly
• TinyURL
• twurl
• dwarfURL
• snipurl

While all of these services a great for mobile use and sites like Twitter where the character limitation is an issue, they really make it hard for the user to figure out exactly where they are going by clicking on that link.

Take for example a common Twitter Spam tactic; the spammer follows you with a single tweet, with some random phrase suggesting that you follow the nice shortened link.  Almost certainly this is a spam account, but to correctly mark this post as a Spam message, since they really haven’t technically spammed you yet, you need to know where that shortened link goes.

Now any sane person [read: any person that knows whats going on] will just block the spammer and not be bothered about it, but some people [read: most] might click the link to see where it goes. Unfortunately many of the people in the later group might not always keep their OS or browsers patched up and would be completely susceptible to any recent vulnerabilities that the malicious site might hold.

The solution, well unfortunately its real place is in the browser. When a snipped URL is used the browser should take responsibility for letting the user know where that click will take them.

looking at the request we see that the link is 301 Moved to the new location:

The browser should follow the link to the 301 and place the Location: header in the tooltip for the user to see.

This way the user can make a “slightly” more informed decision on weather to click on the link, report it as spam or just ignore it.

Now the drawback of adding this to the browser is the rate of update to keep on top of the shortening services, would be horrable. While Firefoxs add-ons could facilitate this, browsers such as Opera, Safari and to a lesser extent Chrome this could be pain for both the developer and user.

The suggestion. Well for the time being the presenting site should take responsibility until the browsers catch up. While this would cause the presenting site to make an extra connection to catch the 301 the information could be cached to keep the traffic down on popular links.

Though this is not fool proof and does require more maintenance, the service it offers to the user would be transparent an beneficial to many.

Now that’s a better Tooltip.