Comments on: Cligs URL Shortener Closes

By: Cligs URL Shortener Acquired by Mister Wong | CenterNetworks

Cligs URL Shortener Acquired by Mister Wong | CenterNetworks — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:16:58 +0000

[...] months ago we noted that URL shortener Cligs was closing. From our previous post, “The developer behind the Cli.gs URL shortener service has announced [...]

By: Zahid Lilani

Zahid Lilani — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:55:12 +0000

I believe that eventually all the short url services will close down because one day they will realize it can’t make money on its own.

Hootsuite has ow.ly, maybe it will make it.
Bit.ly might survive too.

Other shortening services like digg etc will survive but tinyurl? I don’t know about that.

By: shally

shally — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:53:52 +0000

It was an amazing service. But it is closing down soon.. Can’t wait to see what are the next service that they will give us..

By: Cli.gs URL Shortener To Shut Down

Cli.gs URL Shortener To Shut Down — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:22:41 +0000

[...] question to longevity of URL shorteners, the popular Cl.igs service has announced on its blog (via CenterNetworks) that it is shutting [...]

By: Nikolay Kolev

Nikolay Kolev — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:55:19 +0000

Good point and that’s why we should start using URL shorteners with a business behind them like Digg, StumbleUpon… or better yet – stop using any. It doesn’t seem that either TinyURL, or Bit.ly are gonna belly up anytime soon, but still – they are a plague. If you have a browser on your phone, you most probably have a Twitter client, too. What’s the point then to have URLs (even short) in text messages? On the web there shouldn’t be any limitation and URLs should not be included in the character count.

I proposed an idea ago, but people don’t seem to get the beauty of it: when sending tweets to space-limited media (such as SMS), Twitter can use some notation for temporary link IDs and have a validity of let’s say 7 days or those IDs (for example, #1234567). You can always go to m.twitter.com and key in that link ID on your phone, if you care, which in most cases you won’t. On rich clients (web included) and via the API, you always get the original URLs with the link IDs that Twitter can automatically generate for consistency.

What do you think?

By: Allen Stern

Allen Stern — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:32:53 +0000

ok – fair point – so let’s do this – just like TinyURL, i can select the preview or not. On the preview page, let me click a box if the url is spam or hacker. Then those bad links can be reviewed by someone at the URL shortener for handling. I’d like to see one main db for the bad urls that all shorteners can ping.

By: Curt Grymala

Curt Grymala — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:23:47 +0000

I agree with you about the preview option, but I think that might throw quite a few users. If your grandmother were to click on a link, and came across a middle-man verification/preview screen, that might confuse her.

I think the solutions being implemented by apps and sites like TweetDeck, Friendfeed and Brizzly are more user-friendly for the time being.