http://www.idkfa.com/v3 idkfa: syndicated http://www.idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=1457&msg_id=1457 I don't know if anybody really gets any value out of the stuff I write here, but I think it's important, and interesting, and good to know if you're interested in the nature of the Internet. In recent years, a service called Twitter introduced a message distribution system that lets people send short messages over the internet to people who have subscribed to those messages. By short, I mean 160 or so characters. The overall quality of information one can transmit in 160 characters has been a criticism of the service, but people continue to use it in the interest of having access to short thoughts from their friends, politicians, celebrities, and a number of businesses who find interesting ways to use the service. Out of Twitter came the necessity for URL shortening services. URLs (e.g., http://idkfa.com) are human readable "resource location" addresses, or at least, were initially designed to be human readable. Their initial intention was to define a) the protocol over which you were accessing a file, b) the host which was supposed to serve you the file, and c) the resource location on that host of where you expect to find that file. Most web sites only make you memorize the host name, providing default pages at the "/" resource location, and most web browsers don't require you to enter in the http://. Even if efforts are made to make it easier for humans to enter URLs (bookmarks, URL completion), there's still the problem that most URLs (after they've been "helped" by the computer) are much longer than 160 characters (even much, much longer for sophisticated and intricate web applications). Thus, Internet companies invented URL shortening services. These services would take a long url (say, http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=1&msg_id=1) and turn it into something like http://bit.ly/g3WVDN (from 54 characters down to 21). If a person clicks on the bit.ly link, they are taken to the kaiden@idkfa.com (kaiden) Indiscernible from Magic Wed, 15 Dec 2010 20:18:56 -0900 http://idkfa.com/v3/v_thread.php?thread_id=1457&msg_id=1457