url-shortening

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Amazon lets students rent textbooks

Hackers attack News Corp.

Apple Mac OS X Lion launch tomorrow

CNN live news comes to mobile

Google buys g.co

Bitly has raised $14 million in a few years, and shrinks more than 8 billion Web addresses a month. And it's done all that without anyone running the company full time.

Until now. Technology vet Peter Stern, whose last start-up ended up being acquired by Facebook, is Bitly's first official CEO.

He's taking the reins from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who helped hatch Bitly as one of his incubator's projects and has overseen it since, while juggling lots of other balls at the same time.

Stern founded Zenbe, an e-mail start-up that Facebook "acqhired" last fall, … Read more

Google took a somewhat arcane but important step yesterday in improving its goo.gl URL-shortening service, making it available not just through the Web but through third-party software.

Google announced the goo.gl application programming interface (API) yesterday. That makes it possible, for example, to let software such as TweetDeck shorten Web addresses to more easily fit within Twitter's 140-character constraints.

As with other services such as Bit.ly, the goo.gl service can share data about the expansion of the URLs. That's useful for companies that want to know how many people clicked a link in some … Read more

A new virus is infecting Twitter users through the use of URLs shortened by the goo.gl service.

Apparently triggered last night, the virus is spreading as a result of users clicking on links that start with http://goo.gl, Google's URL shortener. TechCrunch is saying that the virus started on Twitter's mobile site and has been growing through different URLs, including http://goo.gl/od0az and http://goo.gl/R7f68.

The virus tries to redirect unsuspecting users to malicious Web sites, according to Techweet, which says that the messages are coming from new, disposable Twitter accounts as … 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

What was once "the Internet's first and only sex-positive URL shortener" is no more, thanks to a conflict with Libyan law.

The Vb.ly service combined the initials of blogger and sex columnist Violet Blue and the .ly country-specific Internet domain associated with Libya. The combination didn't work out, an outcome with potential implications for bit.ly, those use it, and address-shortening services in general.

"Pornography and adult material aren't allowed under Libyan Law, therefore we removed the domain," Alaeddin S. ElSharif, a representative of Libya Telecom and Technology's Web services Department, … Read more

Jeff's back to complete a week of episodes, and although we don't normally condone eating on the air (because it's gross), we'll make an exception for Wilson's favorite treat--Lotte Koala chocolate cookies! Anyone else see the resemblance? On today's episode of The 404 Podcast, we're delving into the bizarre world of Kindlerotica, aka e-reader pR0n; Groupon is offering $60,000 scholarships to any baby parented by a couple that used a Groupon on their first date; Google's new URL shortener Goo.gl; and a blacklist of words that Google considers too nasty to include in its Instant search feature.

Online coupon distributor Groupon just debuted the most ridiculous PR campaign we've seen in awhile--it's offering $60,000 college scholarships to Groupon babies, and here's how it works. To participate, two people must meet through Groupon's dating Web site Grouspawn, agree to go on a date at a restaurant that accepts Groupon coupons, and see what happens from there.

A Groupon baby is only eligible for the $60,000 scholarship prize if it was conceived on the first date, and proof must be obtained in the form of photographic evidence, credit card receipts, or waiter testimonials. Make sense? There are already 166 members on the Grouspawn Date Assistant, so get on it!

As of Wednesday of this week, the most downloaded novel on the Amazon Kindle Webstore was "Compromising Positions" by Jenna Bayley Burke. As you might not have guessed from the subtle wit in its name, "Compromising Positions" is an adult-rated novel that represents the latest trend in Kindlerotica, or e-porn.

Whereas classic romance novels are traditionally targeted at women, this latest genre is definitely written for men and most of the titles read like text out of Penhouse Forum letters. It's disturbing to think that people are actually reading these stories in public, but the problem may be that Amazon is distributing these stories for free, which explains why they keep popping up on the best-seller list.

None of us really get the appeal, and Jeff puts it best when he describes his visual affinity toward the subject matter. In either case, if you want to check it out, another novel called "Office Slave" seems to be a good place to start....but do everyone a favor and stay out of the subway when you read it, OK?

Speaking of dirty birdies, the 2600 just published the Google Blacklist--Words that Google Instant Doesn't Like, and there are a ton of submissions. Google Instant is a new search feature that shows results in real time as you type. It also relies on predictive results that could potentially save you two to five seconds per search, but that opens up the floodgates on certain words that Google deems universally offensive.

So alongside the standard four-letter cusswords and NSFW terms, there's also a heap of ambiguously dirty words like "golden," "lemon," "teen," and an entire section dedicated to variations on the word "dog." Use your imagination, or just check out the entire list, at your own discretion--this is your official NSFW warning!

Oh, Google also unveiled its own URL shortener called Goo.gl. FYI, we spend less time talking about that than it took for you to read the previous sentence.

Have a great weekend everyone!

URL shorteners may be handy for your tweets on Twitter. But they're also known security holes since they don't display the actual address of your destination. A free tool from security vendor AVG may provide a solution.

AVG has updated its free LinkScanner tool to detect malicious pages hiding behind shortened URLs. The company said the tool checks the actual destination of each URL link to make sure the page is legitimate.

More than a dozen URL-shortening services abound on the Net, including TinyURL and Bitly. With its 140-character limit, Twitter automatically shortens URLs in each tweet via … 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