Play the Tinyurl Game

by David Bradley

Enter a random string of up to five alphanumeric characters and click "Go" (don't hit return) to get a page for which a tinyurl shortcut was created.

You'll find some golden nuggets. It's like surfing old style when we used to hit buttons like "Cool site of the day" or "I'm feeling lucky" but with a vaguely creative element (you have to think up the alphanumeric after all).

None of the pages that appear is connected to sciencebase in anyway whatsoever, they're basically random pages from the web that have been stored in the server at Tinyurl.com. You'll probably see some 404 missing page errors, but these are sometimes interesting in their own right.

If you were worried about wasting time on youtube, this is even more addictive... It doesn't work for all combinations of numbers and letters, only "counting" up to as far as the system has reached. At the time of writing "lkedr" was the most recent, and so the biggest combination available. There will be lots more since then, of course, such as lkeds (a weird random graphic), lkedt (a fisheries listserv entry), lkedu (an ebook sales blurb).

Now that bit.ly and dozens of other systems have entered the field, the competition is much greater and so too are the opportunities to play games. Many of the new systems and updated versions of the old URL shrinkers allow you to choose a keyword, so that instead of a random string of letters and numbers you have the chance to put an actual keyword into the shrunken URL. Try adding chemistry, science, physics, nano, sciencebase etc to the end of URLxl.net for instance...