Skip to Content

Free TUAW iPhone app -- try it now!
AOL Tech

301works posts

Filed under: Web services

Cli.gs URL shortener closes up shop

Cli.gs is the latest player to drop out of the competitive and unstable URL shortener market. On October 25, the service will stop accepting new URLs and stop running analytics on old ones. Cli.gs will release an export tool soon, so you won't lose your URLs entirely when they stop working. Cli.gs is also apparently up for sale, if anyone's looking to jump into a really unprofitable market. Even though this looks like a pretty clean shutdown, it raises some important questions about URL shortening as a business: it's something we all rely on, but it doesn't make any money on its own.

Tr.im learned the same lesson when it closed down and then re-opened as an open source service, but there are still plenty of other URL shorteners out there in the same position as Cli.gs. Interestingly, Cli.gs is a member of 301Works, a collection of shortURL sites that teamed up with the goal of indexing all of their shortlinks, so that if a service went down, there would still be a way to see where its links used to go. Cli.gs is looking at the best way to use 301Works, but there's no plan yet.

Filed under: Business, Utilities, Web services, Open Source

Tr.im goes community-owned, takes shot at Bit.ly

The drama around URL shorteners doesn't appear to be ending any time soon. Here's a quick recap, for those who haven't been following:
  • Tr.im, the fourth most popular URL shortening service, shut down because of the insurmountable advantage its competitor, Bit.ly, gets as a result of being the default URL shrinker on Twitter.
  • A couple of days later, Tr.im was back, still angry about the perceived Bit.ly monopoly, but ready to continue operations or sell to someone who would.
  • According to Tr.im, Bit.ly offered Tr.im $10,000 for its domain name and all of its links. Tr.im said no to this and other reported offers.
  • Meanwhile, Bit.ly joined a coalition of similar services, called 301works, to create an archive of shortlinks, in case a shutdown like Tr.im's should happen again in the future.
That brings us up to today, and Tr.im's announcement that it's going to be community-owned. By positioning Tr.im as the people's URL shortener, the site's operator, Eric Woodward, hopes to achieve a large enough market share that Tr.im's collection of links can be a meaningful (and open source) data set for analysts. Tr.im has split off from parent company Nambu, and Woodward has agreed to personally cover any shortfall in Tr.im's operating costs.

In his blog post announcing the community-owned model, Woodward criticizes the 301works group as a Bit.ly publicity stunt that will be ineffective in solving the dead link problem. He's quite clear that Tr.im will not be joining 301works, and that community ownership is a better way to preserve links in the future.

Filed under: Web services

Short URL saga continues: major services form 301works coalition

In the aftermath of the quick shutdown and restart of popular URL shortening service Tr.im, several important players in the short URL market have joined an effort to archive short links in case other services shut down. The coalition is called 301works, and it will be run by Gnip. Other participants include Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, Cligs, URLizer, and urlShort, and the most popular service going, Bit.ly. Even after giving users a scare that their links might be going away, Tr

301works will function as a directory of shortlinks, so users of the participating services should be able to see the destination of any short link, even if that service stops operating. 301works will be to short links what The Wayback Machine is to dead websites. It's not a guarantee that every link will always resolve, just that you'll be able to see where it pointed when it did.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio