Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

drawds — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:12:29 -0000

with 10 digits + 26 lowercase letters + 26 upper case letters, and 5 characters you have nearly a billion possible combinations.
If they used 6 characters, that means 56 billion possible combinations.
In X years time when they run out, they just need to add another character or get another domain like b.mp, r.mp, lv.ly, l.dy, l.mp, and they get billions more out of each.
Plus, all that needs to happen for URL shorteners to die off is for twitter to allow embedding a link with however many characters you want into your message without taking it from your character count.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

davidakhoa — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:39:38 -0000

That's cool, I guess. To me, there is such thing as 'too short'. I was actually happy with TinyURL, then it switched to Bit.Ly and just when I got used to it, this comes along.

I just wished there was some way on Twitter itself (without installing an addon or whatever) that we know what we're clicking. Like hover your pointer over the little link and it would show the full link or the title of the page we're going to or something. I'm sure it'll be an official feature in the future...

http://twitter.com/davidakhoa

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Don Salva — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:58:54 -0000

Or you could go with u.nu ( http://u.nu/ ), which has been around quite a bit.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

plasticmadness — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:15:56 -0000

I guess my comment will look silly, but honestly I don't really have a clue about how do url shorteners work. Anyway: isn't it logical to suppose that the url's will get longer in time? (there's only so much combinations you can have with a given number of characters, right?) So what will they do when the short urls are no longer short enough for the sake of saving characters (specially for Twitter, obviously)? Will they reset all the old short url's? Or, perhaps, create another url shortener domain, like j.mp? When j.mp is no longer short enough, they'll come up with another one, and so on... I use is.gd when I need shorter than bit.ly. I used to like tr.im, but it's fate is still indetermined.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

blehhh — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:14:04 -0000

Pointless

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Neal G — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:08:00 -0000

Hmm, I thought ICANN wasn't allowing single digit domain names anymore? They even took back several that were issued in the 90's. Oh well.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

jb — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:14:10 -0000

I'll take 2 characters. Why not? It kind of reminds me of the spinal tap scene where Nigel proudly points out how his amp's volume goes to 11. Jm.p allows you to go "2 characters shorter". Smart move since every character counts on twitter and other sites (e.g., LinkedIn Updates, Facebook, etc.)

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Hejazi — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:08:17 -0000

It's just an alias to bit.ly, so if you replace "bit.ly" in any url with "j.mp" it'll work! and vice versa.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Donagh Mc Sweeney — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:02 -0000

Ah come one! Seriously!

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Helen — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:59:33 -0000

wow, thanks. At least this would save us 2 more characters.
I love it :)

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Martin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:59:25 -0000

I wonder how much they paid for the domain, will it make good business sense?

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Dyegov — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:53:53 -0000

bit.ly still seems better to me. It's more recognisable and 2 characters is not much of an improvement.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Justin Thorp — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:27:43 -0000

Was clicking on Bit.ly links earlier and it was popping me over to the j.mp links but it was broken. Was really weird. Could definitely tell that they were amidst the deploy.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Jason Rukus — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:26:45 -0000

You know at first this seems a bit silly but I have to side with a we did it because we could mentality.

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

macewan — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:24:17 -0000

j.mp/macewan =)

Re: Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters

Brandon_Sheley — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:23:33 -0000

I saw this a little bit ago when I was sending a link
I would still rather use bit.ly