“Rita, did you check your brother’s homework?” That is one of the daily questions my mother asks my sister. I do not think my mother ever called my sister by her full name Fahima Nessa. It is not her real name, but close to it. One of the reasons we do not call a person by their full name is that it is time-consuming. This concept is not far from hyperlink or URL. When we are dealing with SMS, we cannot afford to send a link that is very long especially since we have 160 character limits.

Another reason we do not call people’s full names on normal occasions is  because it feels weird. I can imagine someone hanging-up a call when trying to spell out the letters of a long sentence. It is one of the reasons company bitly.com came up with a URL shortener. Of course, there are other companies that can do the same thing. However, many business owners are not aware that the URL shortener also has tracking and other data linked to it. For example, if we sent a text to my sister Rita,  “New job found. Click the link to view job info – oncallma.com/xEfkx”, we know how often the link was clicked, what time, even their location. Furthermore, we can even determine if the link was forwarded to someone else by using what we call cookies.

If your mother sends you a text “Ur report card came in today. I took a picture – bitly.com/dktex. We need to talk.”, make sure to disable your GPS before clicking on the link. If you do not, then the next message could be “Tell Jr. that you need to leave his house right now”.

Oncallma.com
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