witter’s dramatic rise has helped ignite an industry to shorten Web addresses to fit within 140-character messages. With the technology, though, comes a new handful of challenges.
Among the challenges are reliably connecting people to the Web sites they want to reach, keeping spam and phishing attacks at bay, and maintaining the service into the future.
Joshua Schacter, founder of Yahoo’s Delicious site for storing and sharing Web bookmarks and now a Google programmer, summarized the issues in an April rant about short-URL problems. “I feel that shorteners are bad for the ecosystem as a whole,” he concluded.
TinyURL’s interface for creating short Web addresses.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Until a remote future arrives when Twitter and the telecommunications industry decide 140-character messages are too short, though, URL-shortening services aren’t going to go away. Fortunately, their potential problems can mitigated through careful use, and newer services such as Bit.ly are being designed expressly to avoid the pitfalls.
And even if some service falls by the wayside and stops functioning–well, welcome to the real world, where not all information is preserved.
“In the digital age, everything has a certain amount of bitrot,” said Paul V. Mockapetris, who invented the Domain Name System (DNS) that serves as the Internet’s address book.
Growing like weeds
URL-shortening services are abundant and becoming more so. They’re usually designed with a priority on minimum character length, not easy reading: Is.gd, Bit.ly, Twurl.nl, Tr.im, Sn.im”, Cligs, and TinyURL. If you want to see dozens more, Mashable has a long list.
And the traffic they handle is large. On a typical day right now, Bit.ly is used to create 5 million to 7 million shortened URLs each day, and it handles 25 million requests to expand them–and the growth rate is at a breakneck 5 percent to 15 percent week over week, the company said. Snipurl has delivered 53 billion since its inception. And TinyURL has a database of 293 million URLs.
URL-shortening services have been around for years–TinyURL was founded in 2002, and SnipURL, which also operates Sn.im and Snurl, in 2001. The services typically were used to keep long URLs from being split into chunks in e-mail, where line limits of 80 or fewer characters could break up a Web addresses.
So what’s new now? First, Twitter, and second, shortening URLs is becoming an actual business–notably at present through the addition of “analytics” features that can let those who use the service see data about how many people clicked on links, when, where they’re located, and the Web page where they found the shortened link.
TinyURL’s funding today primarily comes from advertising on its Web page, but that’s changing, said founder Kevin Gilbertson. “I’m working on something else that should increase that (revenue) quite a bit,” Gilbertson said. He declined to share details at this stage beyond saying, “It will not change any functionality.”
He’s employed contractors, but with the new funding, he expects to hire full-time programmers and improve his computing infrastructure. Also coming is analytics. “We will be offering that sometime here soon,” Gilbertson said.
Snipurl has been run as “a personal endeavor,” said leader Shashank Tripathi, with just three employees, but the new climate has got him thinking about venture financing.
Getting analytical
Analytics are important for URL shorteners, in part because it helps the services break out of low-value freebie use to corporate accounts that need to track what’s going on.