I'm Starting a New Trend

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

I want to start a new trend. I want to combine Google Maps and TinyURL. The idea is that you do something, and you figure out where you did it. Then you use Google Maps to zoom in with a satellite or hybrid view, you click on "Link to this Page", and then you click on your TinyURL extension (which you must have if you want to be cool in any way). Then when you tell your friends about it you simply include the link as only the last part of the TinyURL like this: (grfbc) which is one of the new Cincinnati stadiums.

So if the trend works, and you see a alphanum string in parens then you know to go to, in the above case: http://tinyurl.com/grfbc, or say I want to talk about where the President lives (f5ov6), or what I'm studying this summer (ht3p7), or where I'm going at the end of the summer (oxmeu). I can very succinctly add extra information without messing up the page with URL's.

This translates to paper well too since "tinyurl.com/" is all you need to type in in addition to the paren'd part. That is, all you really need to remember is five or six (or in the future seven) characters. As far as I can tell TinyURL has a comparatively high shelf life (I've tested old TinyURLs from 2003 which, for the internet, is very old). Since TinyURL counts in at least base 36 it will be a long time before we ever get up to even ten digits (I think 36^10 is something like three or four Quadrillion).

Now all I need is someone to write a Mozilla extension which converts a paren'd string to a URL.