Five TinyURL Alternatives and the State of URL Shorteners

Posted 10/08/2009 at 1:00pm | by Florence Ion

14

Comments

Print

Ow.ly

Ow.ly is great for Tweeting and keeping track of who clicks and retweets your Meme links while managing to use only four domain characters, just like Is.gd. You can also upload images and files to share directly with your feed, which is an excellent option for those who don’t want to go through the grueling process of finding a site to host their files.

Ow.ly currently allows you to upload photos and supported documents, and may soon offer video hosting. Though this all sounds like a great package, you might grimace when you find that Ow.ly links from Twitter will most likely be branded with the toolbar. However, if what you’re going for is retweets, then it might prove helpful in gathering many hits to your link.

Notlong.com

Notlong is an incredibly simple and straightforward URL shortening service that does not track clicks and does not provide retweets. While this shortening service is wonderful if you want no frills, it does have a few issues. We feel like the link shortening service may not shorten the link as much as it could—after all, the domain “notlong” is already seven characters long, which is long compared to ow.ly and is.gd. However, if you just need a link that you can give its own alias, notlong.com works just fine as an alternative to tinyurl (where many vanity extensions have already been claimed).

The Uncertain Future of URL Shorteners

TinyURL was the first to come on the scene and pave the way for URL shorteners. Its reign fell short when Twitter suddenly switched over to Bit.ly. It's not certain why Twitter made the movie, but Bit.ly has since managed to raise $2 Million from prominent investors. We know that the money is probably for server space, but what is Twitter's stake in all of this

The founder of Cligs (blog.cli.gs) put it bluntly: “Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own.” There is simply not a profitable market for these kinds of services beyond obtrusive advertising, which can be extremely deterring for new users. With the competition heating up between services, which ones will be around long enough to actually outlast all the rest? Tr.im attributed its demise to Twitter favoring Bit.ly above the rest , therefore putting its services in jeopardy and eventually forcing it to close its doors. It’s great for Bit.ly fans, since the service offers generous features, but what about the users, links and data left behind on the defunct sites? What happens to all of that information? Tr.im has promised to keep its links up by the end of the year, but if it doesn’t manage to sell its assets then all that work will have been for naught, leaving its users around the globe in a slight state of disparity.

There’s also the issue of how problematic these URL shorteners may become; it won’t be long until users will be faced with increasing malware attacks disguised as funny, ha-ha links on their Twitter feed. Users have already been scammed by Twitter bots and malware attacks, why bother adding another layer of doubt to the mix? If URL shorteners aren’t profitable, then there’s no way they can afford to develop a smart filtering system to distinguish the bad links from the good.

If Bit.ly manages to outlast the rest, it will have to change its strategy to withstand the downfall of an already unstable empire of services. Though URL shorteners get the job done and make the Internet an easier world to navigate, their longevity relies on keeping the business out of the hands of destructive forces, like spam bots, malware, and expensive server space. By necessity, the URL shortening empire will stay around for as long as anyone can afford it because of its usefulness.