link-shortening

Bitly, a tech company known for URL shortening, looks like it's heading toward greener pastures and making more user products. The New York-based company is said to have raised about $20 million in funding, according to tech news site The Verge, citing multiple sources. This is double the amount the company raised in its previous round of funding.

"The link shortening has always been a bit of a Trojan Horse," investor Joshua Stylman told The Verge. "Bitly is really an analytics tool for tracking content across the open, distributed web, and doing it at a massive, … Read more

Link-shortening service Bit.ly was down for a period of time last night, but the service appears to be working just fine now.

Last night, CNET editors found first that Bit.ly links were not working and then that all of Bit.ly seemed to be down. A quick search on Twitter reveals that some others had also been affected by the outage.

"Is Bit.ly down for anyone else or just me?" one Twitter user asked late last night. Another user quickly followed that up, saying "For the first time I can remember, Bit.ly is … Read more

If you thought the recent fracas with the Libyan government and .ly domains had put an end to cute, shortened URLs you'd be wrong.

Today, Sorenson Media, a proprietary video codec and video software company, unveiled the latest shortener service, called Vid.vu, which it says has been built to simplify sharing and tracking of video pages.

Users won't just be able to make any link a Vid.vu shortened URL though. Instead, the company is using it in conjunction with its Web-based encoding tool, the Sorenson Squeeze Server. Videos that go through this process can then be … Read more

Link shortening has become a commonplace on services like Facebook and Twitter. Heck, even Google shortens URLs within its products now. People seem to be getting more used to the idea that shortened URLs, despite not showing you where they lead, are safe. Part of that, is that the companies that are doing the shortening keep blacklists of sites with malware or spyware, to keep people from accidentally visiting sites that will do harm.

Newcomer ShadyURL makes no such claims though. This wonderfully satirical service turns even legitimate URLs into something that even the least tech-savvy friend or family member … Read more

It has only been a week since MySpace launched its two-way sync with Twitter, but already the service has made an impact on the popular microblog.

MySpace's "lnk.ms" is now the second most used link-shortening service on Twitter, according to statistics compiled by Twitter link tracker Tweetmeme.

Over the past 24 hours, lnk.ms was included in 15.66 percent of all tweets containing links, Tweetmeme claims. It follows only Bitly, which was used in more than 69 percent of tweets featuring links to outside sources. TinyURL, Owly, and Isgd follow MySpace's lnk.ms with … 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

StumbleUpon's new link shortening site called Su.pr made its public (yet private) launch today. Similar to Bit.ly, it shortens URLs and lets users track where they end up, along with stats on who's clicked on them. It also brings along StumbleUpon's software-free toolbar which lets users hop to both recommended and random links.

However, the real appeal of Su.pr is that it gives each shortened URL the potential for greatness. URLs can be seeded not only to Twitter and Facebook, but also into StumbleUpon's content pool where they can be discovered and promoted … Read more

I am a regular user of Amazon.com, and one thing that's always irked me is the company's use of excessively-long URLs. In fact, they are so long that back in 2002 Google increased the number of URL characters it was indexing just to accommodate them.

Now there's a rhyme and reason to this system, but try to explain that to the person who you just dumped a 150-character URL on in your IM conversation.

Instead of using a third-party link shortening service that might not work if it goes down, you should check out AmazonLinks. This … Read more

Not content to just sit around recovering from Independence Day shenanigans this past weekend, TinyURL released a much-needed feature to its URL-shortening service that others have had for ages: vanity URLs. This means the nonsensical shortened URLs it spits out from your 1,000 character-plus links can now be changed to whatever name you want after the forward slash--that is as long as it hasn't been taken by someone else.

With the popularity of TinyURL and it's automatic integration with services like Twitter, most of the good ones have already been snatched up, so if you're looking … Read more