Of course you know tinyurl.com. And Rex Hammock, faithful follower of goodly wired things, told us about urlzen.com. I’ve seen a twurl.nl in tweets now and then. Ping.fm has its own URL scruncher built-in.
And today, blogging guru Dave Winer introduced me to a company he’s part owner in called bit.ly.
I’ll have to keep comparing urlzen to bit.ly to TinyURL!, because each offers different things. One of my favorite TinyURL! features is that the tinyurl is copied into my memory as soon as I hit the bookmarklet. There’s no dragging, no clicking, no Apple-C, no nothing.
But the others offer all kinds of tracking goodies, and stuff I haven’t even learned yet.
I may not develop the technology, but I sure do like it.
(By the way: whatever happened to the idea that we were all going to start calling them URIs instead of URLs?)
July 11, 2008 at 10:53 am |
Joe,
Thanks for checking out urlzen.com. A few days ago I added a new bookmarklet that also has the auto-copy feature. I didn’t do it that way at first because I didn’t want to overwrite people’s clipboards when they were not expecting it.
I think that bookmarklets are key to URL (URI) shorteners. I am working on more specialized ones (like automatically putting the short URL in the twitter.com message box, etc).
Please let me know if you have any killer features you would like to see in a url shortener. I have found ways to implement most requests.