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“Have you seen that new website…?”

Chances are you have a lot of these conversations.  As the Internet becomes a  bigger part of the everyday lives of everyone from professionals to children to retirees, more and more people are talking about their online experiences during their face-to-face encounters.  This brings us to a very important vocabulary term that often follows next in the conversation:

 

 

“No…what’s the URL?”

The term “URL” (say it just like the name “Earl”) stands for “Uniform Resource Locator”, and is basically nothing more than a web address.  The URL for the blog you are now reading is “http://www.managemypractice.com”, and typing that into any web browser or Internet-ready device will take you to the MMP homepage.  As long as you can remember the name – ManageMyPractice- and the “dot com” at the end, you’ll get to where you want to be.

The “HTTP://” at the beginning stands for “Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol”, and tells the browser what sort of document you’re looking to retrieve and the “www” before the name tells the browser that you want to go to the webserver at ManageMyPractice.  Most servers will automatically point you to the webpage if you don’t specifiy the “www.”- so typing only “managemypractice.com” without the “http://www.” will still get you where you want to be.  The “.com” at the end means the website is a “COMmercial” page- not set up by a non-profit (.org) or government agency (.gov).

Email addresses are another example of an URL.

 

 

“Great! So what?”

Well let’s get back to your conversation.  If you’re talking about a popular, well-known URL – say Google.com or Amazon.com – you’re not going to have any problem getting people to understand you. Most people have heard of, and have used those popular websites before, so there should rarely be a problem.  What about a newly started website, or a little-known secret website like the energy saving Blackle.com or the political statistics blog fivethirtyeight.com?  These are sites that might not be huge destinations on the web, but notice their URLs…both are easy to say and hear, so if people talk about them to a friend in person, or over the phone, someone who has never been to one of the sites could easily get to them, because the URL is easily heard, spelled, and entered correctly into a computer.  This makes choosing an URL for your website extremely important- you want people to be able to hear the URL one time – the first time – and immediately know how to spell it, and therefore, how to access your page. This also makes domains very valuable properties: last April a gentleman from Maryland who bought “http://pizza.com” for $20.00 in 1994, sold the rights to the domain for $2,600,000.

Think about your practice website domain – is it easy to hear, spell and enter?

 

 

Getting URLs under control

Of course, not all URLs are so small.  For example, to check the current price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the New York Stock Exchange at the New York Times website, the address is

“http://markets.on.nytimes.com/research/markets/usmarkets/snapshot.asp?symbol=US%26DJI“.

Now, you probably aren’t going to tell someone over the phone to check out that site.  You’ll probably just say  ”click on the stock section on the front page.”

There are probably a lot of webpages that aren’t homepages that you go to frequently, and would like to tell other people about.  Or, if you use a micro-blogging service (like Twitter), maybe you only have 140 characters to write with, so you don’t want to use a lot of them to type out a long URL.  It would be very helpful if there was a way to represent a long URL like

“http://markets.on.nytimes.com/research/markets/usmarkets/snapshot.asp?symbol=US%26DJI“

with something smaller and more easily digestable…

 

Enter TinyURL.com

What you need is a TinyURL!  TinyURL.com is a free webpage that can convert a long address like

“http://markets.on.nytimes.com/research/markets/usmarkets/snapshot.asp?symbol=US%26DJI”

into a much shorter address like

“http://tinyurl.com/3nndbw” (try clicking on it!)

The first address is 85 characters, while the TinyURL is only 25 characters – a savings of more than 70%!  Once you create the TinyURL  by typing a long URL into the box at the top of the page, the site will create a permanent, small URL that is much easier to Email, Twitter, and even tell friends about!  The site is so useful that Twitter now automatically converts URLs to TinyURLs to save its users the time and hassle.

 

A word of caution

Some nefarious ne’erdowells have been able to put TinyURLs to underhanded uses.  They link innocent-looking TinyURLs to questionable websites to trick people into going to sites that are embarassing, or worse, dangerous and hope that the targets of these attempts don’t check what website they are actually going to before they click the link.  One way to ensure this doesn’t happen to is preview TinyURLs by going to the preview site

“http://preview.tinyurl.com/3nndbw“

by adding the word “preview.” before the beginning of the TinyURL, and there are third-party applications for doing similar security checks.  Of course, as always on the Internet, caution is the rule of the road.

Be careful, and Happy Clicking!

Note from Mary Pat: In case you’d like an option to tinyurl, there are many other url shortening offerings available. Here are a few recommended by the popular website ReadWriteWeb and writer Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Bit.ly is a new URL shortener with some awesome semantic web and geolocation data APIs on the back end. Using it will make the world a better place.

SnipURL offers many of the same stats that Bit.ly does but is friendlier to use. 

Cli.gs has analytics and a new “geotargeting” feature

 

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Tags: address shortening, HTTP, TinyURL, URL