The Hazards of URL Shorteners

Anyone who uses Twitter or writes articles with a character limit will love the many URL shorteners on the net. If you have a URL such as 'http://www.somehost.com/path/path/more/wibble/filename.html?blah.blah=blah' or similar you can poke it into something like bit.ly and get a much shorter version. The shortener service simply handles the URL and redirects to the real site.

Obviously the main concern is that you don't know what you're clicking on. A link to bit.ly/12345 could lead to anything from hardcore porn to the official Dora the Explorer website, you just have to trust whoever sent you the link. But it's not always trusting the link creator to not be an arsehole, you also have to trust their spelling, as this story [infoworld.com] shows.

In a nutshell, California politician and ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman, or one of her staff, recently posted a shortened link on her official Twitter feed to a news article about local police support for her campaign. What tweeters got when they clicked the link was a YouTube video of a tall, long-haired oriental gentleman in a pink tutu playing the bass guitar. I'm not entirely sure what moral can be drawn from this, other than to be careful when using URL shorteners. That and the fact that anything, no matter how surreal, that you can possibly think of (as well as some stuff you couldn't) exists somewhere on the net.