urls

At first glance, this sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Sex writer Violet Blue has launched a new URL shortening service, Vbly (found at Vb.ly), called "the Internet's first and only sex-positive URL shortener."

This means that Vbly has a different policy than other shorteners. Blue, and Vbly creator Ben Metcalfe, encourage the use of this service for creating links to adult sites and other "NSFW" links. They do not run their links through filters, as the market-leading Bitly (found at Bit.ly) does. Although, as Blue says. "I think we'd … Read more

Eric Woodward, creator of the short URL service Tr.im, painted his product into a corner when he announced first, that he was going to take it offline, and then a few days later that he wasn't. Nobody wants to trust their Web links to a capricious business that could go offline again, and take working links and traffic with it.

On August 17, Woodward put a fresh coat on the prior week's drama with a new gambit: He said he was giving the service to the community. In the bitter post announcing this plan, he continued to claim that due to the fact that Twitter made Bit.ly the default URL shortener for the service, a product like Tr.im has no real chance for success. Related, he says, is the recent announcement of the 301works archive for short URLs, which he sees as a craven publicity stunt to boost Bit.ly, since the same people behind it are also running 301works.

Woodward says that the Internet needs an open link-shortening service, because the traffic data short URLs generates is too valuable to entrust to a single company. "You can't get the aggregate data on what's being shared in real time by everyone," he told me. "Twitter wants to become a real-time search engine, so the data Bit.ly is capturing is very valuable."

(Bit.ly data is currently wide open, at least on an individual URL basis. Simply append "+" to a Bit.ly link to get traffic stats on it. Woodward wants to see a "fire hose" of short URL data, however.)

A Twitter keiretsu? Woodward does have reason to be envious and even suspicious of the Bit.ly-Twitter relationship, although it's difficult to draw the connection all the way to malfeasance on the part of the two companies. And it's hard to believe that his strident posturing will win him much support outside of a small group of the most zealous open-source boosters.

Several powerful companies in the Twitter ecosystem are inter-related. Bit.ly's CEO is John Borthwick, and Borthwick is also CEO of Betaworks. Betaworks helps build companies in the social-messaging space. It incubated Summize, the Twitter search engine Twitter acquired last year, and through that deal Betaworks remains connected to Twitter. Betaworks has also worked with Tweetdeck -- which also uses Bit.ly as the default link shortener. The company has several other Twitter (and Facebook) projects running right now. Suffice it to say that if you're in Betaworks' network, you've got great access to Twitter. If you're competing with a Betaworks portfolio company to get Twitter's attention, you've got a tough road ahead.

Betaworks is one of the drivers of the 301works short URL data project, and it's the relationship between Bit.ly and 301works that led Woodward to shun the project, at least for now. "There's nothing wrong with it in theory, but it doesn't solve the link rot problem," Woodward said. He added, "Why would I give them the publicity?" … Read more

In light of the near-shutdown of Tr.im--and the actual closing of URL shortening services like URLTea, Shurl.net, and Qurl.net--users of the URL shorteners still standing may wonder what's going to happen to their favorite services if they, too, go belly-up.

On Friday, Gnip is announcing that it's releasing a public database that will give URL shortening companies a place where they can archive or escrow their short URL directories, in the event their services shut down. The database would provide a way for another company to take over the services of the closed URL … Read more

URL shortening service Trim is reopening its doors, restoring service to both existing Trim links and the core of the site that lets users make new ones. A company blog post that details the change of plans says that the company will continue to run Trim "indefinitely" while a trustworthy buyer is sought out.

Trim originally began experiencing problems late last week as all of its shortened links stopped working for several hours. Then, over the weekend, the company announced that it would be shutting down come the end of December, taking all of its shortened links with … Read more

With so many URL shortening services out there, this was bound to happen to at least one of them: Trim is shutting down. According to a blog post by parent company Nambu Networks, it was an expensive and fruitless effort.

"We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential," the post read.

Those expenses may have been particularly encumbering recently, when the service, found at Tr.im, was hit by a denial-of-service attack last week that knocked it offline.

The blog post was tinged with … Read more

One of the myriad URL-shortening services out there, found at Tr.im, suffered an outage for some time Wednesday, rendering many links unable to redirect.

The service--which is owned by a start-up called the Nambu Network--believes hackers are to blame. "From this end it appeared we suffered a denial of service attack, and we took appropriate action to get the website back to full service," a Trim representative said to CNET News in an e-mail.

There's another, less likely possible culprit: Airline JetBlue hit one million Twitter followers on Wednesday, and announced a one day-only commemorative … Read more

Here's a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It's just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme … Read more

After two days of silence, Digg has gone on the record to officially acknowledge the change in how its shortened links are redirected, as well as clear up how links will be handled in the future.

The change, which took place on Sunday, had links which once lead directly to a story's source, redirecting to Digg's story pages instead. The new behavior appeared only on stories that had been submitted to the site, leading to confusion on where users would go when they clicked on a shortened Digg URL.

In a post on Digg's company blog, CEO … Read more

Over the weekend, social news site Digg changed how its links work in a way that gives the site an increase in the number of users who visit.

Users of the site's URL-shortening service noticed that if the Web address they had shortened had been submitted to Digg, the shortened URL would then take its visitors to the story's page on Digg instead of the page it linked to. At least it was this way for users who were not logged into Digg; registered users who had turned off the DiggBar (and who had a recent log-in cookie from Digg) would not see the change in behavior.

This may seem like a small change, but it's a big knock on Digg's shortening service, and for Digg's credibility at maintaining features.

Introduced in early April, the DiggBar was originally intended as a service that did three things: one was to shorten links and act as a redirection tool. The second was to bring Digg features along for the ride with a framed bar that would appear on the top of the page and provide a simple way to view user comments, related stories, as well as other Dugg items from that same site. The third was to provide a simpler way for users to publish content, either to Digg itself, or places like Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. This included giving users the capability to shorten a URL by dropping a Digg.com/ in front of the site's address.

Despite the bevvy of features compared to some competing URL-shortening services, both users and publishers alike found fault in the DiggBar. Users had problems with the service since it drastically hid information about the site they were on, including the URL in their browser's address bar, and any bookmarks they saved, which would retain the DiggBar. For publishers, there was the worry that users would choose to comment back on Digg instead of on their own pages, as well as SEO damage from search engines not properly indexing and attributing traffic since Digg.com was the redirector.

Digg's solution, which came just two weeks after the DiggBar launch, was to make the whole DiggBar experience something users had to opt-in to see. This meant that registered users of the site would only see shortened Digg URLs, and the DiggBar by choice. Stray visitors of Digg wouldn't see either.

In effect this left the DiggBar as something power users could take advantage of, but that casual users would never see--reducing the entire DiggBar feature down to URL shortening.

This clearly wasn't good enough for Digg, since this move nets the site more ad impressions and unique user tracks than it would by acting as a redirection service alone. Back when it was originally introduced, the company was able to get by since the DiggBar displayed ads when people were using certain features such as viewing related content, Digg user comments, and other stories from that site's particular source. But, without the DiggBar on top, and without any kind of recognition--other than in name, Digg was getting none of these benefits.

So is Digg's shortening service now just a way to shorten links to Digg.com pages? Digg founder Kevin Rose went on to say as much in a Sunday night appearance on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, citing that the company was having to internally juggle certain shortened-URLs that had become popular from outside sources. Particularly, ones from Twitter where the source site would be on the receiving end of an increasing amount of traffic, but because of the lack of a Digg frame bar on the top of the page, it wasn't easy for users to… Read more