11 replies to this topic

[Kreg Steppe]

It may have been suggested before, but has Evernote considered providing a shortened urls for shared notes instead of the long

http://www.evernote....1f5ed6f7585e6dd

Perhaps something like:

http://j.mp/K6zv47

[jbenson2]

There are two ways I create shortened URLs.

My most common method is to let Evernote embed the link directly into my sentence.

or if I want to track the usage of the link, I will use Google URL shortener to create: http://goo.gl/VS85Y

[Kreg Steppe]

Just to be clear, what I am referring to is when I click the "Share" button in my client, instead if the big ugly url being copied into my clipboard, have a nice clean one I can then paste into an email or chat client, etc.

I would make sharing much easier with people, but especially twitter since there is already a 140 character limit.

[Jackolicious]

Hi Kreg, thanks for posting. This is an issue that has caused us to go back and forth internally. The tradeoff here is the security (read: guessability) of note shares. We've reached the scale now where we need to worry about people guessing or brute-forcing note URLs. Privacy is a top priority for us and the last thing we want is someone's privately shared note to be discovered by an unintended party.

Twitter hasn't provided ample reason for us to create short URLs since they have a built in URL shortener already. Do you have any other cases where you would want a shortened URL?

[Kreg Steppe]

Thanks Jackolicious for replying to this thread.

You bring up a good point. I was thinking about short urls more in the aesthetic sense, rather than security wise and that makes a lot of sense. I can see how it would be much easier to figure out a short url.

Again, thanks for the info.

[Jackolicious]

We know the URLs aren't pretty and we've been moving to obscure them whenever possible. Please do let me know if there are any other cases where they cause issues.

[starryeyez024]

+1 on this, has there been any progress on the URL shortening? The auto-generated links from skitch are terribly long.

[adrian_n]

Hi there
I just had the same question and found this disuccions when I googled for solutions. Just above this site Google answered my Search with a referral to http://s.evernote.com/, a shortening service using Google's URL shortener.
Is this an official tool by EVERNOTE? Couldn't this be implemented into Evernote and Skitch? Does anybody know?

[AET]

This would be helpful for me too. I use evernote links in the description field of my calendar events a lot, and the long ones can get cumbersome.

[Michael 'MC' Carter]

+1 from me too -- Re the security concern, just make integration wit, for example, bit.ly optional in the preferences, with a warning that security is lessened by activating link shortening.

@Jackolicious, to clarify, my desire for shorter links has nothing to do with social media updates (as clearly Twitter and all social media dashboard have integrated link shortening), but rather when pasting links into emails and instant messages. The links are currently 106 characters long! Yes, in an email I could select text, then apply the hyperlink to the selected text, but that is extra work/clicks ... I just want to be able to paste the link in (including in the IM example -- we use HipCha) and have the links nice and short, not distractingly long and untidy as they are now.

Other scenarios include pasting links into SMS messages (e.g. via Apple's Messages app), calendar entries (as per @AET's example), help tickets (e.g. in Tender/Zendesk type apps).

Lots of reasons that shortened links would rock!

[prodromus]

I would also really like to see some solution to shorten the URLs, obviously without weakening security here.

@Jackolicious My usecase would be to be able to print them into QR codes at a decent resolution. I would be fine with a solution, that allows only myself and named other users to access the note behind the URL (maybe by simply signing in before displaying the note?). For "public" notes you could then of course use the same implementation without the authentication...

Do you have any thoughts about this?

[ebusinesstutor]

+1 for shorter links. Long links can be broken, especially when you paste them into emails. A build in url shortener would save me a step.