There's been a lot of buzz about cloud computing over the last year or two as more and more applications (email, Office, note-keeping and so on) move to the web. Then, a little over a month ago, I started seeing a lot of buzz surrounding something called CloudApp.

A more generic sounding name, I could not imagine. All I could tell from the "OMG CLOUDAPP!!" tweets was that there was a new app named CloudApp, that beta invites were being issued soon, and that a lot of people were very excited about receiving an invite. I'm not sure anyone knew any more about it than I did other than "OMG IT'S IN THE CLOUD™ " and "OMG IT'S AN APP" and "OMG CLOSED BETA INVITE ONLY".

Three possibilities crossed my mind:

1. Sociological study of the feeding frenzy surrounding beta invites and tech buzz words.
2. Twitter phishing scam
3. (remote possibility) an actual app.

Possibility #2 was confirmed in my mind when I saw the following tweet:

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.

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.

URL shorteners, while convenient, are bad for the web. They hide the true destination that they are pointing to, giving bad guys yet another tool in their arsenal, while conditioning web users to blindly trust the links they are clicking on. Further, as the debacle with tr.im showed us, URL shortening services aren't necessarily permanent.

It's no coincidence that the rise in popularity of URL shorteners closely mirrors the rise in popularity of Twitter; Twitter's 140 character limit is the special ingredient that makes Twitter so compelling, but it's also what made short URLs valuable. Some of you will say that short URLs are useful for other reasons - for example, in print. True, but Twitter is by far the place they are used most.

So, with a 140 character limit, how could Twitter eliminate URL shorteners? Well, first, let's look at the reason for the 140 character limit in the first place. It was chosen because Twitter expected SMS messages to be the primary way that users would interact with the service. While there are many users using it that way, their numbers are far eclipsed by the number of users using Twitter on its native web site, or using one of the plentiful Twitter client apps that are available for both desktop computers and mobile phones.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Su.pr is a URL shortening service similar to TinyURL, Snipr, and dozens of other services that let you take a long URL and condense it into just a few characters to share in an email, Twitter message, Facebook status update, or anywhere else.

But there are few things that set Su.pr apart. First, like Bit.ly, Su.pr offers analytics that let you know how many times users have clicked on your links. And second, Su.pr is run by web site discovery service StumbleUpon, and every time you shorten a link, you also add a web-based StumbleUpon toolbar to the link that lets users vote on the story. In other words, when you shorten a link through Su.pr, you're not only able to share it with the few dozen friends who read your Twitter updates, but if they like it enough they can vote it up and brings thousands of StumbleUpon visitors.

Up until recently, the service was only available to a small group of beta testers. But today Su.pr dropped the beta label, and with it the need for an invitation to use the service. Anyone can use Su.pr to shorten a link. But you can also login with a StumbleUpon account to keep track of your data and if you want to post updates directly to Twitter using Su.pr, you'll need to enter your Twitter login info.

[via TechCrunch]

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're tired of clicking on shortened URLs without knowing exactly what web site they're taking to you, Long URL Please can help. This Firefox add-on automatically converts most shortened URLs on any web site into old fashioned long and boring URLs.

The extension supports 64 popular URL shortening services including TinyURL, Snipr, bit.ly, and Digg. Long URL Please attempts not to break your page formatting, which means that you may not see the complete address in a web page. Instead, it will chop off the end of most URLs when displaying them on a web page. But if you mouse over the web address your browser status bar should fill in the blanks, letting you know whether the link goes to CNN or a less reputable site that you may not want to visit while at work.

[via Lifehacker]