Alex Churchill

I love TinyURL. It’s one of those tight little services that takes a widespread problem (urls so long that they wrap in emails) and solves it in the most straightforward way possible (shortening said urls). Early on, TinyURL would only provide randomly generated URLs. You would input a very, very long URL and get something like this – http://tinyurl.com/al7xm. More recently, they’ve added the ability to customize your TinyURL. Input something long and end up with something in the format http://tinyurl.com/whatever, specifying anything you want AFTER  tinyurl.com/.

Other than being elegant and convenient, this custom TinyURL feature has resulted in a great, untapped and unseen body of what I will call “status editorials” – the words people use to finish off their TinyURLs and what they say about the content they are linking to. Who developed these links? When? And why?

tinyurl.com/obama – Links to the home page of UK tabloid The Sun. Republicans – scouring the globe for fair & balanced coverage about Obama being an alien.
tinyurl.com/shit – Someone doesn’t think too much of Ratchet & Clank for PS2.

tinyurl.com/madoff – Disappointingly, and accurately, links to the original SEC press release of December ’08. More salaciousness please.

tinyurl.com/billgates – Links to the economist “probituary” of Gates’ time at Microsoft. It’s somehow fitting that Bill get mixed reviews in perpetuity.

tinyurl.com/lolcats – I won’t actually link this. Suffice it to say that it leads you to being rick rolled in the most annoying fashion possible.