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Excerpt: I was reading an article by Tom Critchlow on  why we shouldn’t use tiny urls in newspapers. All good stuff, but this got me thinking about how the tinyURL system works? TinyURLs are useful when referring people to sites on Twitter. Clearly we require a mapping which takes a URL and maps it to a unique but shorter URL. Hash tables do this; there is an input and a method of encoding which generates the tinyURL. What could be used? MD5 produces a code that is 32 characters still too long and a usability minefield. Other MD codings are available and MD2…