Is this a challenger to TinyUrl?
There are many URL Shortening services on the Internet, and TinyUrl is the best of them. There are some services available of course which offer niche features such as NSFW.in (which is useful for shortening NSFW URLs – the person opening the URL is aware that it will lead to a NSFW site); then again there are totally weird ones like ZombieURL. None of these of course come close to TinyUrl’s popularity. Maybe, there is one now. It’s called Bit.ly.
Bit.ly is a URL shortening service with a lot of differences. Some small, others big. Let’s talk about all the good things in Bit.ly. Here’s a list:
Caching URLs
Bit.Ly caches the URL that you have shortened so that if for some reason, the original is not available any longer, the visitor to the shortened URL can still see the content. They use Amazon S3 for storing the cached page and EC2 to process it. I am not sure if this amounts to copyright infringement (although it is useful), but since Bit.ly doesn’t take you to the mirrored page until the original is down, at least I won’t have a problem doing this for my website. Of course, I am assuming that their mirrored pages will be prevented from being indexed in search engines.
Since the scraping is done when you are creating the URL, the URL creation process itself is a little slow. It takes some time before you get your smaller URL. I wonder why they don’t do this asynchronously.
Custom Labels
This service allows you to specify a custom label for your shortened URL, if available. For example, http://bit.ly/observe points to the homepage of this blog. This feels much better than some weirdo characters which is usually the case. This also allows you provide context to the URL, which is very useful.
URL Statistics
This is a neat thing. The service allows you to view statistics on any shortened URLs (number of clicks). What is more is that they make these statistics available through XML or JSON feeds. This combined with open Dev API (see below) can make for a very decent developer platform. Along with clicks, you also get information on referral data.
Developer API
This is probably the best feature of all. There is an open API which allows you to create shortened URLs, as well as retrieve original URLs given a shortened URL. This combined with the ability to query the usage statistics for a given shortened URL, I can imagine a whole lot of applications for this given API.
There’s more. ReadWriteWeb reports that Bit.ly is semantically analyzing all URLs that their users shorten. Once this data becomes meaningful, this will also be shared with all developers. Great thought, I think. As a developer, I will be able to query the data that Bit.ly is amassing in a semantic manner.
Looks good to me. The bookmarklet on my toolbar for TinyURL has just been replaced by Bit.ly.