Friendly URL’s at Amazon

November 10, 2005 / Filed under: Usability, Web Sites

I swear, one day (of course, I probably won’t be around anymore), Amazon.com will finally get friendly URL’s!

I know there’s URL "converter" applications out there - which basically take the extremely long Amazon URL, and make it into something really short. I’ve seen some of these web sites, but I’ve never really seen this idea take off.

In any case, I’d like to share my Amazon Wish List with my family and friends - but the URL is so uncontrollably long - I practically need two emails to forward it to others! (sarcasm, yes.) I was "crafty," and was able to found a much shorter URL to that Wish List linked above.

And to be fair, Amazon URL’s have improved, over the years. I have been noticing more clear, descriptive URL’s, and definitely much shorter. So I am being a little over-dramatic here. But I still have a point.

I still dream of the day that my Wish List URL looks something like this:

http://wish-list.amazon.com/users/matt-thommes/34238123/

Aaaah, nice, sweet, and pretty. Not to mention descriptive, and self-explanatory.

Comments/Mentions

# Josh at 11/10/2005 3:36 pm cst

http://tinyurl.com/ is great if you want to share your wishlist or something. Obviously it's not a solution for the WHOLE of Amazon, and they really need to fix that, but for limited application it looks worthwhile.

# Andy at 11/10/2005 4:54 pm cst

Josh beat me to it, but I actually did it for you:

http://tinyurl.com/dnvhl

# Matthom at 11/10/2005 4:55 pm cst

Thanks Josh... I agree TinyURL is helpful. But like you said - for the WHOLE of Amazon - this is not the way to go. After all - we're looking for semantic meaning in the URL - not some other application interpreting it.

So, if I send everyone my Wish List as a link with the words tinyurl.com/... in it - that doesn't explain (to the naked eye) what the hell I'm linking to. After all - what does tinyurl mean to anyone?

Sorry for the slight rant. I'm more talking to myself, in this case.

# Josh at 11/10/2005 5:46 pm cst

Yeah I agree. It bugs me not knowing where a URL will take me, which makes me opposed to TinyURL in a way. For things like your wishlist, however, I reckon it's a viable option, even if it's not technically ideal (for a variety of reasons, including dependence upon another provider, non-semantic URIs, extraneous DNS lookups, etc).

# Matthom at 11/10/2005 5:50 pm cst

Thanks Andy - yeah, works fine. I have to admit it's pretty nifty.

# Andy at 11/11/2005 3:35 pm cst

I agree about semantic meaning. I wonder if there is a service out there that lets you generate a categorical URL that might help--this still isn't getting at the core issue, but what if there was a Wordpress/CMS plug-in that let you generate third-level "tiny" URLs. You could just setup a HTTP redirect for this too I suppose. Here is an idea: setup "wishlist.matthom.com" to redirect to your long ugly Amazon (or the tinyURL I pasted above) and mail that out to family and friends. That way, you are even Amazon/website-independent!

# Matthom at 11/11/2005 3:49 pm cst

Brilliant, Andy! (It sure helps that Dreamhost comes with unlimited sub-domains for many of their plans.)

I wonder if many other hosts offer this. Probably.