When the case of the letters in the URL cannot be conveyed – then you should not use Bit.Ly. A perfect example would be when you need to give some one a URL over the phone (or a podcast) – unless you dont mind saying “uppercase A, lowercase x, uppercase C”.
Here are some examples:
http://bit.ly/Yr7qw – goes to MSDN article “When to Use MSDE”.
http://bit.ly/Yr7qW – goes to an article on www.myDigitalfc.com
http://bit.ly/Yr7QW – goes to GumTree.com (a weird dating site!)
You get the idea!
Use the TinyURL service if you dont want your URLs to be case sensitive: http://tiny.cc/7ww2e
http://tiny.cc/7ww2E
http://tiny.cc/7WW2E
All of the above resolve to the same MSDN article.
When I created Lincr, I faced this dilemma as a developer. Case-insensitive short URLs will ensure easy readability and less confusion, but case-sensitive URLs means you get a million more URLs in half the amount of letters, so to speak.
ReplyDeleteBut I decided that it's more important to have people read and reproduce the short codes even if copy-paste is unavailable, so I went with case-insensitive URLs.