Is Url Shortening Safe ?

Yeatarday I saw a report on CNN about how social networking sites like facebook and specially twitter are serving as havens for cyber criminals. A large number of users post all sort of private information on these websites and people take advantage of this information. Also, people are mislead by posting wrong information about certain high-demand topics.

In my opinion the most destructive aspect specifically with respect to the twitter is the URL Shortening ot Tiny URL’s. From the last many years people have become increasingly cautious about visiting malicious websites and it is a general best practice now not to click/download links that you don’t trust.

The Tiny URL phenomenon takes this all away, where you are following hunderds of people, celebrities wicthout actually knowing who is behind the username and then there are literally millions of tiny url’s which people post daily and you access the link without trusting its authenticity. You never know where it will redirect you.

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror also has a different take on Tiny URL’s.

Google Shared Items Sorting

Just realized that Google Shared Items are sorted with the date of the post and not the date on which you have shared the item. I think it should probably be sorted by the date of sharing than the date of the original post, after all its your shared items and you should have control over sequence of sharing.

Most of the times I skip a log of blogs and only choose a particular few, but when there is time I tend to catch up all what i skipped through. If a share something which actually is a post from an old date, the shared item list shows it down the list after the items which I shared earlier.

This actually caused a problem with TwitterFeed which would only select based on the last updated item (probably with date) and do not update the items which I share from previous dates.