I’ve never really been a big fan of URL shortening services. My main reason is because you lose a bit of branding and URL recognition from users. Also the ‘memory’ factor. Users can’t remember shortened URLs, unless you have an awesome one like bit.ly/hangman. But now my real reason for disliking the shorteners is the abusive use by spammers.
Spammers are using URL shortening services such as bitly, tr.im, is.gd, etc to make their evil links look a lot less evil. People have entered a ‘trust’ for short URLs and now spammers are exploiting it.
It’s simple. Create a nice email, use bitly to obfuscate the destination URL then voila, the user will click it out of interest and wonderment. Most of these spammers so far have been them drug selling spammers and they all follow the same process – bitly a link to a blog, which has one post linking to their online pharmacy. Fun times.
The only real cool part is that bitly has public stats available. Take the bitly url, put a + on the end and bitly will show you stats. You can see when the spammer started, how many people clicked it and all sorts of fun things.
Ah well. C’est la vie.
