Re: CHAT Tiny URLs (was: NonVerbal Conlang?)

Hi!

Roger Mills writes:
> I've been wondering (idly...):
> What is tiny url's system? I suppose they'll never run out of strings, but
> if every tiny url is eternal, then it's amusing to think that years in the
> future, even tiny urls will run to two lines :-))
Hardly.  Given 26 letters in two casings plus 10 digits they can make
IDs for URLs counting in base 62, so if the ID is one char longer
there are 62 times more IDs of that length than of the previous.  For
addressing each atom in the universe, they need only 45 characters
fitting easily into one line even with http://tinyurl.com/ prefixed.

Of course, they will certainly run out of disk space if they try to
store the ID->URL map for the whole universe on a disk that is part of
that very universe... :-)

> And why don't sites with huge urls tiny-ize them to begin with, or as an
> alternative?
I suppose it's an additional step in design, and those tiny URLs are
not comprehensive or hierarchical at all.

> I've never tried this: if you ask for two tiny urls in a row, do you
> get anything resembling consecutive strings?? ...
No, you typically get two totally different URLs.

> I suppose if you ask to tiny-url a site that someone else has already done,
> you get that original tiny url, not a new one. ...
I think so, too.

**Henrik

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