Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Dries Grobler Jr. @Yaarik — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:39:55 -0000

eish.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Michael Bauser — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:21:36 -0000

A reference implemetation of the "insurance" script is an excellent idea. You should definitely do that.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

daver — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:02:17 -0000

That is true, creating your own does only solve part of the problem. Think about the numbers of links that are created on these services though. If everyone (well not everyone but a good number) suggested links for their own site or used their own services it would prevent a few sites/companies from creating a problem. You cant force people to use any service but you can at least try (Amazon has one http://blog.go2.me/2009/04/... )

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

vrypan — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:52:25 -0000

I keep hearing the same thing "create your own". This is useless. Do you care more about your links to other pages, or links to your pages? In the second case, it doesn't matter if you have your own shortener: what matters is which one(s) people linking to your pages use.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

daver — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:47:32 -0000

They are free services that make no money. Let me repeat that. They are free services that make no money. Unless they can figure out a way to pay for the server and bandwidth costs they will all go out of business.

Your best option is to create your own.

Just sayin'

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Paul O'Flaherty — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:47:15 -0000

Makes a very strong case for hosting your own URL shorting script on your own site.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

bustedkeys — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:08:13 -0000

whew! lucky i don't use tr.im!

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Infernocloud — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:47:39 -0000

Imagine if Google provided their own short URL for every result. That's as good as an everlasting short URL as you can get.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Eric Marcoullier — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:42:00 -0000

Earlier today John Borthwick at betaworks / bit.ly posted a great call to action regarding 301works. We at Gnip have offered to partner with them and provide all the engineering support and bear all the hosting costs to make 301works a reality in days, not weeks. This is hugely needed and I'm sure that betaworks and Gnip combined (along with other foward-thinking companies like awe.sm) can get it up and running ASAP.

Eric Marcoullier
CEO, Gnip

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

vrypan — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:12:17 -0000

Michael, a webmaster having the mapping of (short,long) URLs and that live in his own domain, could easily write a redirect script in any scripting language. All it takes is enter the pairs in a DB table, read the first one and redirect to the second one. (In order to keep the links working, they don't have to create a full URL shortener that is able to create new short links).

But you are right, urlborg should provide a couple of example implementations, at least in PHP. I'll look into it.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Michael Bauser — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:57:32 -0000

I had not heard of urlBorg.com before this. That's an interesting approach, but it's still got a single point of vunerability in the urlBorg server. If urlBorg dies, the webmasters using the service may "own" a list of links, but they have to come up with their own technical solution for implementing them. It's a weak insurance policy, at best.

A really robust system would require webmasters to run their own "shortening servers" that sites like urlBorg would communicate with via APIs, so that a shortened link can be created via urlBorg, via the local server, or via any other shortener that supports the API. The end result would be that people could use any compatible service to shorten a URI and receive a shortened link on the webmaster's local server.

This would be a difficult system to monetize, though, so it's probably not going to happen.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Guest — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:57:28 -0000

Hey, this is Chris from Jolt Media Group (jmg.com), parent owner of Linkbee. We are also trying to reach out to Tr.im without any success. We are in position to acquire Tr.im, but it has been impossible to get in touch with them. I question the validity of them actually shutting down. Possibly a big domainer made an offer they cant refuse to redirect all the traffic?

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

raphaël — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:09:33 -0000

I agree. This workaround is only valuable for sms. A sms is everything except a long-term ressource. Twitter offers other meta-datas around the tweet, such as the tool used to publish the tweet. It's so obvious that they could deploy a url-shortener embeded with metadata in 2 days, such as " hey guys, just found this website, have a look..." The status would be better used and twitter should have to make it work well for sms only.

And bit.ly should have to redefine his business model.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

RexDixon — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:54:42 -0000

Be sure to read John Borthwick's response to this on our blog post, which I did just RT via twitter for those that follow me:

@bitly: 301Working: http://bit.ly/kqoa9

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Jon Stringer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:19:11 -0000

Good Point!

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Michael Bauser — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:15:43 -0000

According to TechCrunch, Bit.ly has approximately twenty times the traffic that Tr.im does. They don't really need to buy Tr.im's userbase. They'll probably get most of Tr.im's users for free, anyway, since Bit.ly is Twitter's default, and Tr.im's announcement all but declared Bit.ly the "winner."

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Solve Marketing — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:57:10 -0000

Would it be a useful idea for platforms with such a need to have their own shortener? It would simply be a convenient benefit to it's users. It's not as if I care what the shortener says (looks like), so why not? Could be a continuation of a branding philosophy for companies.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

bhartzer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:50:06 -0000

I I were tr.im I would definitely take them up on that offer.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Michael Bauser — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:46:59 -0000

Not for all. If Bit.ly buys a failing competitor, all you've done is change the Bad Business Plan from "sell it to Twitter" to "sell it to Bit.ly," and Bit.ly finds itself in the position of being its competitors (free) insurance plan. Where's the profit in that? After all, there's a hell of a lot of stupid URL-shortnerners that are going to implode in the next few years.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Avatar X — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:46:23 -0000

Maybe it failed because of who owned it was completely naive?... the owners are the same guys from Nambu that decided to go with such a service opening beyond the users of its client. That was the mistake, since they expected Tr.im users to be Nambu users and then hoped for monetization to come to them later. A big flaw on that master plan is that we are talking about a Mac only app and that they were quoted as saying that they didn't had the resources to produce a Windows version of their app and lost pretty much all momentum, since most of the buzz they had was from people expecting a Windows version of Nambu....They would have done fine if they had kept tr.im tied to be used only by Nambu users.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

Michael Bauser — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:38:28 -0000

I disagree. Most users are idiots. The ones who try to "save" a company are usually self-involved idiots. A user-run tr.im would be underfunded, badly-run, and have no business plan.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

PhilipCamacho — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:07:54 -0000

Why doesn't Twitter have their own shortener?

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

tallfreak — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:49:35 -0000

URL shorteners should only be used for one-time things like status updates, sending a cool link to a friend, etc. I would never use them as a permanent bookmark or referred link from my website. That's just laziness not to use the whole URL in that situation.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

kosso — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:36:30 -0000

I agree. The only reason and place that Twitter should need to shorten a link is in a mobile SMS. The websites and clients (even the mobile ones) dont *need* to be under 140 characters.

But I would say that the community acquiring trim would be problematic. Who would run it?
When I built a shortener at urlb.at I found it got pumped and hit full of spam by countless bots all day every day.

I have all but given up on it.

But I have built my own shortener for phreadz ( phz.in ) - which ONLY points to phreadz.com post full urls. I have found this to be VERY useful, as it means I can change the url structure, if need be, and none of the short urls will break.

Re: SHORTURL SAVIOR: Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im

dave — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:24:54 -0000

I would not go along with this.

Much better solution -- the users pool their resources and "save" tr.im.

Or even better yet -- Twitter finally allows the users to attach a URL -- of any length -- to a tweet, obviating the need for url-shorteners. I feel fairly confident that technologists at all companies, even those at bit.ly, will agree this is the best solution.

URL-shorteners are at best a temporary workaround for a limit Twitter shouldn't have. Imho.