How to Avoid Being Caught by Bad Tiny URLs

Bit.ly Warning

It seems Bit.ly is now starting to warn visitors using their shortened URLs about bad sites being linked up using their service. This is excellent news and I wish the other website address shortening services would follow suit.

What is the issue, why is it a problem, and what can we do about it?

Website address shortening services came about because some times the page you are visiting can have a URL that is extremely long. If you want to send this web address to a friend over email, internet instant messaging, cell phone SMS text messaging, internet relay chat, or more recently, via a Twitter tweet, these addresses could be so long they either break when the person receiving your link tries to click it, or be so long they are rejected by the service altogether.

So rather than send the exact address that you find in the address bar of your web browser, instead you would copy and paste the address into a URL shortening service that would in turn create a shorter URL for you to use.

When someone then clicks the shorter URL they are “redirected” from the service through to your intended destination.

Sounds good so far, right?

The problem is, when someone sees one of these short URLs, instead of seeing where they will be taken, they see an entirely different address. We can not tell anything from the URL we are given about the nature of where we will be taken.

A safe but annoying example would be for us to be sent a “Rick-Roll”, that is we are given a link that purports to be some breaking news or cool site, only to be taken to the famous Rick Astley YouTube video instead. Ha ha. Got me there.

Rather than safe but annoying, more and more malicious and inappropriate content is being shared this way, spread via spam, trolls, phishing emails, and now Twitter.

You might be sent a message saying “Get a free iPod Touch!!!!”, but when you click the link it takes you to a malware site, or something that you would not want your family or boss to see.

How to Avoid Being Caught Out

Do not trust email messages or Twitter users that you have not got to know first.
Log out of important services when not in use, especially Twitter.com – “Cross Site Scripting Attacks” often make use of people being permanently logged in to web services.
Use TweetDeck or equivalent Twitter desktop tool to avoid Twitter.com and to translate the short URLs back into long URLs

TweetDeck translates short URLs for you

The biggest tip I can give is … If in doubt, do not click!

Obviously the vast majority of links you will come across are going to be safe and harm free, but it does not take much for someone to be given a big problem just by clicking an innocent-seeming link. Better to be safe than sorry, eh?

Got any tips to share? Please let us know in the comments …

Posterous – True Smartphone Blogging

I recently got into a new social media service that is very cool. While it has been around for quite a while, it only just really exploded. You might be thinking “Oh no, not another social media tool du jour” but actually this one is very cool because it ties all your others together and helps you contribute to them.

This service is called Posterous and while it appears to be a stripped down blogging service (and it can be used for that) in fact I have been using it as a media and cross posting service.

You see what it has that none of the others can do is really intelligent multimedia handling and posting via email.

Email Posterous and your text appears as a blog post
Blog posts can be automatically cross posted to your real blog
New posts get tweeted and added to your FaceBook updates
Send a photograph as an attachment and it is uploaded to Flickr and posted into an article
Send multiple photographs and you get a gallery widget
Attach a video and it posts to your blog and YouTube
Want a podcast? Record an audio note and send it over and you get a media player widget for your mp3

So unlike FriendFeed that aggregates your lifestream, Posterous allows you to post to it. For smartphone owning social media fans it is the ultimate mobile blogging tool – you can keep your friends up to date with everything you are up to in complete multimedia.

Pretty cool, huh?

Yes WordPress and some blogging tools have had post by email before, only Posterous has this level of ease and functionality. There are more features to come, including themes.

Here is a video shot by Steve Rubel interviewing the founders.

Another neat feature is you can point your own domains at it, rather than use the lame *.posterous.com domain. My own Posterous account is at http://www.chrisg.co.uk for example.

This means should anything happen to the service at least you have not lost all your link equity. Take regular backups and you might be able to salvage the whole thing, or move over to WordPress when they inevitably steal all these great ideas.

Once you are a member you can comment and subscribe to other folks Posterous, and comments can also be posted as status updates to keep the conversation crossing over into social media.

I got so into this I think it could be the rebirth of the personal blog after Twitter has had the spotlight for so long. What do you think?