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Comment by jazzychad | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for submitting this, John, you beat me to it!

I was with some friends from Twilio at a hackathon one night back in January, and we were all lamenting how hard it was to share a URL with other people at the table w/o knowing everyone's email/IM/etc... and bit.ly links are impossible to pronounce correctly. Someone came up with the idea of sharing a plain english word as the short url key. So, 9 months later I whipped it up. Hopefully a few people find it useful :)

EDIT: I should add that adding + to the end of the key will show you a preview page like bitly links.

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You should make it such that links with expired keys send you to a page with an ad.

Well, I think the reason that things expire is so that he can then reuse those words (since there are only so many short words that anyone can spell), but that is a good idea for ones that have expired but now yet been reallocated.

Might be it could be expanded to a combination of two words, like amazon does for basket checkout.

If the key has been reallocated, it is no longer expired.

The link you created is. If you create a link mapping foo -> google.com, and then it expires and someone else wants a link to facebook.com and shoutcast picks foo as their word, as far as you're concerned, your link is expired because shoutcast.com/foo doesn't get you to Google anymore.

Yes, from the submitter's perspective, their link has been reclaimed. From the service's perspective, a key is either in use or not, and we agreed that keys that aren't in active use could have ads on them.

Given your stated use case, one thing you could do to improve this thing is to filter out obscure homophones of common words. Calling out "aweigh" over the table is just going to produce confusion.

Yes, I'm planning on adding ways to "Flag this word" as inappropriate, hard to spell, hard to pronounce, just no good, etc... and can send them to the blacklist. Easier to let other humans do that on a case-by-case basis rather than me comb through the entire list :)

Why not use a list of the x most common english words between 4 and y letters long?

Because that still doesn't get rid of homophones or hard-to-spell words. But he does seem to use a list of common-ish words. I haven't seen fungible, pulchritudinous, or similar words that the average person may not know.

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