[Owncloud] URL shortening

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

It seems we veered off from the original problem. Shorty is an app for
shortening external links – essentially it’s tinyurl inside your
ownCloud.

The problem Morten has is different though – ownCloud’s own share
links are too long with their massive tokens. This was also brought up
again the other day, and in this issue:
http://bugs.owncloud.org/thebuggenie/owncloud/issues/oc-1562 – we
shouldn’t require people to use shorty or any app to get proper links.

If people generate a public link there’s 2 big use-cases: private and
public. For a private link it makes sense to have such a long token,
for a public one it doesn’t really matter. And coincidentally, it’s
also the public ones you want to share on Twitter or other networks
where you might need a short link.
Using an external service for that has several problems: external
tracking, privacy breach (though voluntary), it can break at any time,
…

What about by default the address being long and tokenized, and then
there’s a toggle in the address field with which you can shorten it?
As discussed in
http://bugs.owncloud.org/thebuggenie/owncloud/issues/oc-135, the
address can get much shorter (as for CalDAV and CardDAV).

If people need an external link shortener to be able to post their
links somewhere, we need to improve. This is not an app opportunity
but a much needed feature which just needs a tiny bit of interface
(but a lot of backend code I assume).


Thoughts?