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The Simple Reason Why Twitter Needs Its Own Short URL Service
Allen Stern - December 19th, 2007
The image below is what appears to be happening about 90% of the time on Twitter URL links using the TinyURL service that Twitter has embedded. I’ve written about this before that they should spend some of their VC cash and build their own – some developers claim it could be done in a day or less. It’s silly to rely on an outside service for this critical business need — unless the two companies are in kahootz?
oh and fix the directmsg screen so that the list is in alpha order!
Read More: Quick News, Twitter
I prefer url.ie, I’m pretty sure it produces the shortest URLs, altho icanhaz.com is a close second. ;]
You should check out http://fupi.ws/ Sonny (our CTO) built the site with his eyes closed. It creates 7 character urls. I’m waiting for him “in his spare time” to create a Fire Fox plugin that automates the generation of the short URL.
I always thought tinurl’s stay around until they haven’t been used for a month or so. So anyway, they are not permanent but I never encountered a problem so far.
It would be interesting to know if this is a glitch or something regularly, But as far as I can tell all tinyurl’s in my twitter stream work.
They could do it in a day, no sweat. I’ve made one and it’s just not a lot of work out side of the .htaccess. It’s easier than a standalone site since it doesn’t need the user interface, just the functionality behind the scenes.
If they were creative, I think they could come up with a decent way to both do their own redirections and provide a clue as to where that redirection was going.
If they didn’t decide to build their own internal service, they could just as easily use one of the multitudes of URL shortening services like shurl, furl, moourl, rurl, and others.
I found a great short url service http://www.qpyn.com it has many useful features that most short url services don’t. If you get a chance, check it out.