TinyUrl posts

Cli.gs URL shortener closes up shop

by Jay Hathaway Oct 5th 2009

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.

Tags: 301works, cligs, tinyurl, url-shortener

Filed under: Web services, Open Source

Tr.im's open source relaunch begins, already running behind schedule

by Jay Hathaway Sep 16th 2009

Tr.im's history is already a bit of an oddball saga: it was shut down, brought back to life days later, handed over from a company to one of the company's individual employees, and then made open source. Well, now the open source promise is becoming a reality, but not as quickly as developer Eric Woodward had hoped. He's announced the first open source release of Tr.im - if by "release," you mean "at least a few more days of work to do before the release." The bigger news is Woodward's plan to hand the Tr.im domain over to a third-party custodian. Much like the open source version of Tr.im, that's also still a work in progress.

On the development front, Tr.im's login and authentication module still needs to be fixed, and there are a few more days of bug fixes to do. As for the third party that might hold onto Tr.im, Woodward has only written that talks are in their final stages, leaving out the important detail of who he's talking to. This all seems like another tease to draw out the Tr.im story while people might still be interested. I actually still use Tr.im, but I'm less interested in its business dealings, and more interested in whether it works properly.

Tags: open source, OpenSource, shorturl, tinyurl, tr.im, url-shortener

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Open Source

Open source MURLS submits links to multiple shorteners

by Lee Mathews Sep 16th 2009

Still concerned about whether or not your favorite URL shortening service is going to go belly-up and leave you with a pile of broken links? Hedge your bets with MURLS.

The tiny, portable application is plugged in to 28 different services including popular ones like bit.ly, tr.im, is.gd, and tinyurl. Each shortener is selectable in the MURLS options screen, so you can create as few or as many truncated links as you please.

Just double-click any URL in the list view and it's copied to your clipboard for easy pasting into Twitter updates or anywhere else you need to send abbreviated links. By default, the app sorts created links by length - shortest links first.

MURLS can definitely be a useful little app for link sharer -- I just hope this doesn't lead to Twitter updates with a dozen shortened links crammed into the 140.

Tags: bit.ly, is.gd, murls, shorturl, tinyurl, tr.im, truncator, url shortener, UrlShortener

Filed under: Utilities, Web services

J.mp is Bit.ly in new, shorter clothes

by Jay Hathaway Sep 5th 2009

Bit.ly dominates the URL shortener market due to its position as the default URL shortener on Twitter, but its features also measure up well against competitors. One area where Bit.ly loses out, though, is in the length of its base URL. Bit.ly is one more character than tr.im or ow.ly and two more than u.nu. Bit.ly is addressing that (relatively small) weakness by introducing j.mp, which is just a shorter version of the Bit.ly everyone already uses.

J.mp has everything Bit.ly has, except the slot as Twitter default. Link tracking, history and user accounts can all be carried over from Bit.ly just by logging into J.mp with the same username and password. In fact, the two services are so connected that every Bit.ly link can be changed into a J.mp link, just by changing the base URL. If you really need those two extra characters on Twitter, you should definitely give J.mp a shot.

[via Mashable]

Tags: bit.ly, j.mp, shorturl, tinyurl, truncator, urlshortener

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

Lessn offers an easy way to create your own URL shortener

by Jay Hathaway Aug 20th 2009

With all the drama around brand-name URL shorteners, a lot of blogs have advised people to skip the big guys and create their own. Easier said than done, though, right? Well, maybe not: Lessn, a service from brilliant designer Shaun Inman (who also developed the Fever feed reader), makes getting a personal shortURL as simple as possible. All you need is some server space where you can throw up some PHP and MySQL.

All you have to know how to do to set up Lessn is enter some login info in a php config file and upload the whole package to your server. After that, you're good to go. You can put in your full URL, and Lessen will give you a short one for it. Then, whenever you want to use your shortener, you can click the included bookmarklet. It might be a lot more work than just using Bit.ly, but having your own shortlinks on your own server means that you don't have to risk a service shutting down and leaving you with dead links.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: DIY, lessn, shauninman, tinyurl, url-shortener, urlshortener

Filed under: Web services

Short URL saga continues: major services form 301works coalition

by Jay Hathaway Aug 17th 2009

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.

Tags: 301works, bit.ly, false, shorturl, tinyurl, tr.im, url-shortener

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Microblogging

La petite url is a personal URL shortener for Wordpress

by Jay Hathaway Aug 12th 2009

The recent shutdown and reopening of URL-shrinking service Tr.im drew a lot of attention to one of the most troubling questions about short URL sites: when one of them shuts down, what happens to the links? To avoid worrying about what a URL shortener might do with your links, you might want to scope out la petite url, a Wordpress plugin for creating tiny links using your own domain name.

La petite url creates links to your Wordpress pages using 5 lowercase characters, something like yoururl.com/nfpqd. This way, your domain name stays in the URL, letting people know which site they're clicking through to. You can also automatically display a short link next to each post, making it easier for readers to spread your links. The disadvantage? Unless you have a tiny domain name, your shrunken URL is going to be significantly longer than the ones you get from ow.ly, bit.ly or tr.im.

Tags: shorturl, tinyurl, url, url-shortener, wordpress, wordpress-plugin, wordpressplugins

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Microblogging

W.tf?! Tr.im not closing after all

by Jay Hathaway Aug 11th 2009

Tr.im, one of the most popular URL-shortening services, shut down last week because its owners saw no way to monetize the service in such a competitive market. Twitter's choice of Bit.ly as its default link-shrinker means that service dominates the market, with smaller players like Ow.ly abd Tr.im fighting over what's left.

Tr.im has its supporters, though, and they apparently contacted Tr.im's owners, Nambu, in such high numbers that the service has now re-opened. Creating new links seems to work fine, and all of your old URLs should be right where you left them.

Was this whole thing a publicity stunt, intended to bring greater visibility to Tr.im? Nambu says no.

They're still looking to sell Tr.im so it can live on, but not to "an unknown group or individual" who might compromise users' existing Tr.im links in some way. I believe that this wasn't a publicity stunt, although there's little doubt it brought the service quite a bit of extra attention.

Nambu just seems to have realized that they had little to gain by shutting down abruptly with a message that basically claimed Tr.im was practically worthless. The overwhelming user response seems to have made Nambu realize that's no way to sell something.

Tags: shorturl, tinyurl, tr.im, trim, url-shortener

Filed under: Web services, Microblogging

Tr.im gives up and shuts down

by Jay Hathaway Aug 9th 2009

Tr.im, the popular URL shortener owned by Nambu, was apparently not popular enough for the company to see any future in it. Tr.im is shutting down, and links will redirect properly until at least the end of this year. The cost of development and server expansion outweighed the benefits to Tr.im's owners, according to a blog post, because users will never pay for shortURL services.

Nambu also appears to be experience sour grapes over Twitter's decision to use Bit.ly as its default link shortener. The Tr.im blog says that "Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future."

It's a crowded field, and some players eventually had to be pushed out, but it's a shame to see Tr.im go. I think it was a better product than Bit.ly in some ways, and I'm all for competition and user choice. Too bad Nambu doesn't feel the same way.

Tags: bit.ly, RIP, shorturl, shutdown, tinyurl, tr.im, twitter

Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Diggbar links now land on Digg instead of original sources

by Jay Hathaway Jul 19th 2009

Digg users recently noticed some interesting new behavior related to Digg's shortURL service, the Diggbar: instead of shortlinks going directly to their destinations, logged-out users who click them will now land on the corresponding Digg.com page. Sure, that's a lot of new traffic for Digg, but it's problematic because the change was never announced, and users who generate Digg links might not know where they're pointing.

Some folks are reasonably upset about the change, including Mashable's Pete Cashmore, who posted the headline, "Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links." Mashable got confirmation from a Digg representative that the change wasn't a glitch, but was working as intended. After the Mashable post went up, though, Digg's Kevin Rose posted on Twitter that he had been on vacation and was not aware of the change. This story is still developing, but I suspect it will end with Digg going back to its old way of handling short links.

Tags: controversy, digg, diggbar, redirect, shorturl, tinyurl

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Extend your Twitter posts with uri.is

by Jay Hathaway Jun 22nd 2009

The 140-character limit on each post is one of the most appealing things about Twitter, but it can also be one of the most annoying. That's why uri.is was created. You can write as much as you want and click to post to Twitter, and uri.is will link to your full text via a shortened URL instead of cutting you off. Sometimes you have something that's too long to tweet, but not long enough or permanent enough to post on your blog, so uri.is offers something in between.

Uri.is was built in a weekend, but it's already got some good features, like auto-shortening URLs within your posts, to make sure as much of your long post as possible actually goes out to Twitter. The developer reports that he's interested in having uri.is integrated with a major Twitter app like Seesmic or Tweetdeck, which is really the only way to achieve the goal of making it as easy to post long messages to Twitter as short ones. A bookmarklet or a Greasemonkey script would perhaps be more realistic ways to improve the service, so it's nice to see that those are in the works, too.

Tags: shorturl, tinyurl, twitter, url-shortener

Filed under: Security, Web services

Greasemonkey script decodes an impressive list of TinyURLs

by Jay Hathaway Jun 14th 2009

It's trendy to use the latest and greatest URL shortening services in IMs and Twitter postings, but clicking on a TinyURL is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. To avoid any nasty surprises, affiliate links, or other deceptive uses of TinyURLs, you can install a Greasemonkey script called TinyURL Decoder.

Although the name of the script contains "TinyURL," that's not the only service it works with. It can decode dozens of different flavors of shortened links. I'm impressed with the huge number of services this plugin includes, from the very popular (the aforementioned TinyURL) to the obscure (PeaUrl). Installing it should leave you well-situated to know where these sometimes-sketchy links are taking you.

Tags: firefox, greasemonkey, tinyurl, tinyurl-decoder, url-shortener, userscripts

Filed under: Utilities, Features, Web services, Lists

A big list of ways to make Tiny URLs

by Jay Hathaway May 19th 2009

With all the URL shortening sites that have been popping up lately -- and even services that let you make your own -- I thought it would be a good idea to take a look back at the link-shrinkers we've covered in the past here at Download Squad. Some of them are legitimately useful, while some of them are complete novelties that you'd only break out as a joke. You'll also have to forgive some of our references to getting Rickrolled -- it was a legitimate concern back then! So, without further ado, here's a big list of ways to create very small URLs:

NSFW.in is designed for sharing links that are Not Safe For Work. Its unique feature is a warning page, in case the person you're sharing your link with doesn't want to see it after all.

Bit.ly is still one of the best link shorteners around. It scores points for tracking the traffic to your shortened link, and letting you see if anyone else has made a bit.ly link to the same URL.

U.nu is a fairly recent entry with a super-short base URL, and the added bonus of generating links that are easy to read out loud to someone or type out from scratch.

Tags: link-sharing, links, service, sharing, shorturl, tinyurl, truncator, url-shortener, web

Filed under: Developer, Web services, web 2.0

Start your own URL shortener with awe.sm

by Jay Hathaway May 15th 2009

Seems like everybody's starting their own url shorteners these days. There's the Diggbar, Amazon's shorturls, and a whole plethora of other shorteners all competing with one another. Well, now you can have your very own -- for a fee -- from awe.sm, which is a pretty great shortlink service in its own right.

The service offers a hosted URL shortener on a domain of your choosing, along with access to awe.sm's already existing traffic anaysis tools and developer APIs. It'll run you $99 a year, with enough capacity to handle all the redirections you'll probably need -- if people create 10,000 of your new URL in a year, you're doing pretty well. Between the time it takes to code your own shortener, and the hosting costs of dealing with the traffic, awe.sm's prices look pretty reasonable.

Tags: awe.sm, custom, shorturl, tinyurl, url-shortener

Filed under: Utilities, Web services

U.nu enters the short URL arena

by Jay Hathaway Apr 26th 2009

The field of link-shortening services is getting a bit crowded these days, with new ones popping up seemingly every week. U.nu is one of the latest contenders, and its attractively short and easy to remember base url might help it catch on. A U.nu link is way easier to type out or read to someone over the phone than the unicode characters offered by tinyarro.ws, for example, and it's shorter than bit.ly or tr.im.

Other shorturl sites sweeten the deal with advanced features like link tracking or custom urls, and U.nu has its own set of perks to consider. It doesn't do fancy analytics, but it does tell you how many people have clicked. It doesn't use characters that are easy to mistake for others, like 0, O, 1, I, and l. It's also not case-sensitive, so anyone typing your URL won't have to worry about proper capitalization.

I find it a little odd that U.nu is focusing on make the URLs easy to say and type, when the most common use cases seem to involve just copying and pasting them, although I can see the benefit if you're on an iPhone. On the other hand, no one else seems to be addressing those particular concerns, so maybe U.nu has the market cornered.

Tags: shorturl, tinyurl, u.nu, url-shortener

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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