The world’s news could resemble “The Onion” more and more as a new URL shortener is launched that allows you to edit web pages as you deem fit.
The folks at The Next Web encourage its employees to work on their own hacks, hobbies, and projects. A similar mindset at Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) is responsible for both Android and the company’s goals to lead the world in autonomous automobiles. Google employees are asked to spend no less than 10% of their time working on projects not associated with their portfolios in the hopes of finding something great.
URL shortener: Great fun with no consequences?
We found something great today, and that something is shrturl.co. The work is the result of Alexander Griffioen, a designer at TNW, and it allows users to type in a URL on the shrturl.co site and click the oversized “Edit” button. Users will then be sent to framed version of the target site that you can edit at will.
While there are certainly real world uses for this URL shortener to improve the web pages of friends or family, expect it to be used in considerably more devious ways. Essentially, you can show someone how to better their site or simply rewrite the BBC’s homepage.
Once you are finishing defiling a respected source of news, simply click ‘Save & Finish’ and you’ll be given a custom shrturl.com that sends all that click it or paste it into their browser to the edited page.
Let the games begin
What makes it even more fun, divisive, and fun is the fact that it works really well. The only downside, if it’s that at all given the ability for things to go viral in our interconnected world, is that the URLs expire after just 48 hours.
The site has already seen nearly a million page views and the more we write about it and share it the more fun the world will become as “Obama Admits To Being a Kenyan Born Muslim Extremist.”
Source: The Next Web
