URL Shorteners

Definition

But Trilobites are not the only creatures that humans resemble. Let us, for a second, think of a field of flowers, each with a certain amount of pollen. We’ll call the flowers with the most pollen the most valuable. When a bee leaves his colony to go out and find a flower, he has to have some way of communicating how he got there when he gets back to the hive.

Usually, this communication takes the form of a ‘dance’, in which the bee shows other bees how to get to a specific field or flower. Afterwards, the other bees follow the path and gain net resources for the hive, eventually exhausting the field of pollen, or value.

The world of Twitter functions in a very similar way. Each person has a group of nearby bees that they can share valuable resources with. The entirety of the Internet is the world, and websites and blog articles are flowers. Those who use Twitter can easily communicate a valuable resource back to the hive by sharing a hyperlink, or shortened way of getting to a flower, to their network.

The hive-like architecture of Twitter allows information to flow very quickly. Increasingly, the dance has become more efficient. Instead of posting long URLs, the idea of the ‘short url’ or ‘tiny url’ has emerged. This allows one to compress lengthy URLs into a small area. These shorter URLs are a better fit for the 140-character cell that Twitter users live in.