Short, shorter, shortest: webservices to make tiny URL’s
March 17, 2011
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140, a famous number for Tweeps. It refers to the maximum number of characters a Tweet can consist of. That limitation poses a problem if you want to add links with a long URL to your message. Luckily, there is a solution in the form of using a URL-shortener, a technique that can easily make URLs shorter in length.
On the web, there are many different services that you can use to shorten your URLs. Tweetdeck (the Twitter application we use in DG COMM at the moment) proposes four URL-shorteners that can be automatically called by TweetDeck to quickly shorten URLs while writing tweets: tinyurl.com, is.gd, twurl.cc and bit.ly. Let’s take a better a look at these four services.
A little history
Tinyurl.com as the first notable URL-shortener since it was launched in 2002. Twitter began using it and that contributed to the leader position of Tinyurl.com in the field. Due to investor issues, Twitter replaced Tinyurl.com by bit.ly in 2009 and the first URL-shortener lost its leading position in cyberspace. Bit.ly has now pulled ahead of the others and is at the moment the number one service on the web. In 2010, bit.ly links have been clicked over 40.6 billion times.
Connotations
The top level domains of the URL-shorteners are not very common. The domain of bit.ly refers to Libya. The suffix of is.gd belongs to Grenada, a Caribbean island belonging to the Commonwealth (UK) and the suffix of twurl.cc belongs to the Cocos Islands, near Australia.
An advantage of choosing these exotic domains, is that the names are memorable for the public. Especially by incorporating the domain name into the brand, like bit.ly. However, some suffixes can have different connotations. For example the .cc domain is preferred by many Christian organisations because CC also happens to be the acronym for ‘Christian Church‘. And now, with all the unrest in Libya, is it also then problematic to use bit.ly?
Reliability
Another risk that is more important, relates to international law. By using foreign country domain names, the website is under the jurisdiction of that nation. In the past, Libya, who owns the domain .ly, has shut down vb.ly, also a link shortening site. According to Libya the content of the site was against Sharia law. When a service stops working, all URLs related to the service will become broken. This is called ‘link rot’ and this could have a devastating effect when countries decide to shut the servers of URL-shortening websites down. Even though bit.ly formally is under jurisdiction of Libya, bit.ly CEO John Bortwick asserts that his service is safe. For the domains to be unresolvable, the five root servers that are authorative all have to be offline and these servers are not only in Libya, but also in Oregon and The Netherlands, so Gadhaffi can’t turn it off. Is.gd claims to be an ethical link shortener, and it is run by an organisation based in the UK, so yay, a European solution. However, we are not too sure if it is as reliable as bit.ly on a daily basis.
That were in short 
the four URL shorteners TweetDeck proposes. At the moment bit.ly is the undisputed market leader, but the list of open source websites where you can shrink your link is inexhaustible. More and more websites are developing their own shortener. Google has introduced for example its own URL-shortener, goo.gl. What is your opinon about all these different services? What do you think of creating one on your own? And is the URL shortening business trust worthy at all? After all, by clicking a shortened URL, you never know where it takes you.. (http://bit.ly/fI6F7y)
//Fleur and Anne
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March 18th, 2011 at 11:24 am
The comments settings had been switched off, but they are back on now.
//Anne
March 18th, 2011 at 11:56 am
Hi, for Touteleurope.eu and my account, I’m using Hootsuite, another CM tool like Tweetdeck.
March 18th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Our problem here is that most of the PCs only have Internet Explorer 7 installed and then we have problems with both the new twitter interface and hootsuite. We are also trying to use European tools if we can ;o)
//Anne
April 8th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Twitter resolves bit.ly’s addresses for the user and adds the full address to the “title” attribute (which most browsers display as a ToolTip when the mouse hovers over an element). I believe this should be the standard procedure for any shortened link.
April 9th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
bit.ly fan here
April 26th, 2011 at 1:56 pm
When will the EU have its own short URLs?
With bit.ly you could even have it set up within hours (ok, a few days): http://go.europa.eu/libya or http://go.europa.eu/k45f5 (or use another reserved 2nd-level domain under .eu for shorturls)
April 26th, 2011 at 4:44 pm
We are looking into developing our own url shortener. Main issue will be: what will be the ROI of developing it?
Happy to get your views on that.
Bert
May 8th, 2011 at 8:31 pm
Ein öffentlicher Dienst sollte keinen kommerziellen URL shortener benutzen aus Sicherheitsgründen. URL Shortener kann man im Netz finden, das ist alles open source, da gibt es den Quellcode.
Einen eigenen Dienst aufzusetzen ist für die EU auch rein finanziell pillepalle und so geht man sicher, dass nicht fremde Dienste die EU Institutionen und ihre Stakeholder ausspionieren.
May 10th, 2011 at 9:18 am
Bert,
since when is DG COMM acting based on economic principles like ROI?
But to put it differently: what would be the total cost at all? Maybe you could use bit.ly and backup all short URLs (via their API) just in case the service is turned off one day (which is rather unlikely, given its popularity and the fact that it received 10 Mio USD funding back in October 2010).
June 16th, 2011 at 10:43 am
Bert, bit.ly pro just went free: http://blog.bitly.com/post/6560093760/bitly-pro-is-now-bitly
So you don’t even need to invest a single penny. You could simply link go.europa.eu to a bit.ly account.
If you want to be absolutely on the safe side, you could get the public timeline of your bitly account and store all links via the associtaed RSS feed. In this case you can migrate all links to an internal service, should you ever want to move go.europa.eu away from bitly.
June 16th, 2011 at 11:33 am
@ Brusselsblogger: Many thanks for the tip. Will look into it and discuss with our techies.
Bert