Buzz
Every day, over 250 million tweets are sent. Around 290,000 Facebook status updates are posted every minute. And who knows how many instant messages include hyperlinks—probably countless numbers.
One thing is certain: Many of those hyperlinks aren't left in their original form. Thanks to URL shortening services like lnk.co and TinyURL, a typical 56-character YouTube URL can be shortened to 20 characters, clearing out unnecessary URL clutter from your Gchat and providing more space for your tweets.
With the rapid pace of link-sharing across growing platforms, how can URL shortening services possibly keep up?
Since many of these services claim their links never expire (and therefore can't be recycled), they'll eventually run out of character combinations, right? Will URL shorteners become less effective? What happens next? Are aliens real? Did I forget to take my medication again?
The masterminds behind the URL shortening service bitly were generous enough to address the first question in this series. Despite handling 100 million shortened links each day and having created over 25 billion bitly links since its launch in 2008, they don't seem concerned about the issue:
"Bitly uses a six-character hash. As each character can be alphanumeric, they can range from A-Z, a-z, or 0-9. This means there are 62 possible characters for each position (26 lowercase, 26 uppercase, and 10 digits). This results in a total of 62 to the 6th power, or 56,800,235,584 possible bitly links." * "If we were to exhaust the hash space, which would be a good problem to have (it would mean we're extremely popular), we could simply add another letter to the hash. With seven letters, we'd have 62 to the 7th power: 3,521,614,606,208 possibilities!"
