Wowsers! Will the diggbar debates ever end? Eric Meyer asks on his blog today why are people so upset about diggbar in particular and not other framebars like google image search, facebook or stumbleupon aswell? I like the concept of clean semantic urls. When somebody sends me an url, I like when I can have a sense of what that url will give me once I visit it. Now that has changed with twitter you say, everyone uses url shortening as crazy. Though many twitter clients support expanding shortened urls, but with diggbar they have to engineer new code to expand those urls. Because all other shortening services uses standard http redirects they can use the same url expanding code for them. But I don’t have any problem with clicking shortened urls. Even the most semantic url could reveal something completly different than expected. So what about bookmarking or history searching? Here’s why I like semantic urls. If I search history chances are I’ll remember parts of the url. And If I bookmark, it’s pretty obvious why I’d like to bookmark the real url. If not, have a look at this image.
Example of how framebars slows down the web
Ok this example is overkill but it really shows how framebars slows down the web. Imagine if it was diggbar, stumpleupon and google image search in one. It could happend. I made it by shortening digg.com with bit.ly. Then I took that url and put it after digg.com/ like http://digg.com/http://bit.ly/…. Then I took that diggbar url, shortened it with bit.ly and made a diggbar of that bit.ly url. And looped a couple of times.
For some reason I think Google image search results usage of framing is acceptable. I think it has to do with them framing the page that contains the image, and not the image it self if you click the thumb in the framebar.
Update 2009-04-15: TechChrunch writes about a new framebar called twig from VideoEgg. They have a real world example of doublebar with diggbar and twig. This framebar trend is seriously alarming.
Update 2009-04-15: Digg announced in their blogg that they will turn off diggbar for anonymous users and digg users who opted out. Instead of the diggbar a standard http 301 redirect will occur like with any other url shortener. This is great news!
Yupp I know. I dont have any of those on my sites.
You know what else slows down the web and annoys users? Sponsored ‘preview’ popups activated when hovering a link.
;-)
Wow, you’re right – apologies. I don’t know how, but something (on another browser, another computer) was causing those very popups I described here earlier. Bizarre!
Sponsored ‘preview’ popups… Does anyone even click those?
Interesting example.. Overkill it may be, but quite possible..