Where the analog and digital worlds meet.

URL shorteners are websites that provide the service of transforming long URLs into shorter ones (ex. http://criticalgeek.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/url-shorteners/ becomes http://wp.me/pxx2K-21). They have been around for some time, but I believe they were made popular by Twitter. Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, every character counts. The shorter the URL, the better.

At first, Twitter used tinyurl.com as its default URL shortener, replacing it with bit.ly in May 2009. The Twitter client HootSuite uses ow.ly by default.

Twitter also launched its own URL shortener: t.co, but it’s only used for internal Twitter links, maybe it will go public some day. Other websites such as WordPress (wp.me), Facebook (fb.me), foursquare (4sq.com), YouTube (youtu.be) and the New York Times (nyti.ms) started shortening their URLs too.

The major drawback that comes with the use of URL shorteners, except from SPAM and link manipulation, is link rot. Rotten links are dead links, that point nowhere, because the page doesn’t exist anymore. This is all the more annoying if millions of tweets rely on it.

Don’t fool yourself, the risk is real! Since URL shorteners often rely on exotic TLDs (top level domain; ex.: .co – Colombia, .ly – Libya, .me – Montenegro, .ms – Montserrat, .nu – Niue) they underlie the jurisdiction of the country the TLD is assigned to.

A prominent example is vb.ly which has been shut down in October 2010. In fact it was seized by the Libyan web authorities for not being compliant with the law of Libya. A Libya Telecom spokesman stated that

“Pornography and adult material aren’t allowed under Libyan Law … Therefore, we removed the domain.”

Another example is u.nu, which was shut down in September 2010. kl.am had to discontinue its activities too, because it couldn’t cope with the SPAM and the related costs anymore.

When the vb.ly case became public, IT experts advised people to be more critical about bit.ly, as it might face the same problems sooner or later. But nothing happened. Twitter still uses it as its default URL shortener.

I won’t argue that URL shorteners are essential nowadays, but which one shall one use? It needs to be as short as possible, safe and reliable.

This is where Google comes in! A couple of months ago, it launched goo.gl. First it was only usable with Google services, but in October 2010 it was opened to the general public. I don’t understand how this could stay unnoticed…

I don’t know what you are going to do, but I will start using it as of now! I am confident that Google has the necessary cash, skills and influence to meet the requirements of a quality URL shortener. As the .gl domain belongs to Greenland, I believe there won’t be any problems.

Further reading:

Shorter is Sweeter: A Look at URL Shorteners
http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2010/a-look-at-url-shorteners.htm

Exhaustive List of URL Shorteners
http://blog.go2.me/2009/01/exhausting-review-of-link-shorteners.html

Comparison of popular URL shorteners (old)
http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-1720

URL Shortening Wars: Twitter Ditches TinyURL For bit.ly
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/url-shortening-wars-twitter-ditches-tinyurl-for-bitly/

About kl.am and u.nu
http://raventools.com/blog/kl-am-closes-its-shell
http://u.nu/unu-discontinued

Google opens URL-shortener Goo.gl to public
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-01/tech/google.url.shortener_1_google-maps-google-news-web-addresses?_s=PM:TECH