One Year Later, Too Many People Are Still Using TinyURL
One year ago link shortening service TinyURL experienced an extended period of down time and we argued that the outage illustrated serious risks associated with the service. One year later, the landscape doesn't look any less bleak. A search of the web turns up complaint after complaint after complaint about TinyURL being down and links being broken - apparently for at least a day or two every month.
People should stop using TinyURL! In the following post we'll list a few reasons why this is important and point you towards some of the best alternative link shorteners.
Who Cares? We Care!
Some people argue that URL shorteners are inherently bad. They obfuscate links, the put people at risk of malware or RickRolling and they are unprofessional. Be all that as it may, URL shorteners are so useful that they are here to stay.
TinyURL has huge mindshare and credibility because it's been around for a long time, is widely used and its name clearly says what it does. It's very useful to share shortened links with people by email, IM, Twitter etc. but both users and system administrators are sometimes less willing to trust an obscure URL shortener they haven't heard of before.
If you use TinyURL, you run the risk of your links being broken, for several days out of almost every month. How on earth is this acceptable to people? Perhaps other people don't use URL shorteners for anything important, but we do, and we expect the links we share with people to work.
Alternatives
There's a nearly infinite list of alternatives to TinyURL, but here are three of our favorites.
Bit.ly is a new URL shortener with some awesome semantic web and geolocation data APIs on the back end. Using it will make the world a better place. Bit.ly also offers users all kinds of statistics.
We use Bit.ly with the wonderful Firefox extension URLBarExt, though that does add a few steps that aren't really necessary. Once you've got it set up it's super easy to use.
SnipURL offers many of the same stats that Bit.ly does but is friendlier to use. It doesn't have the semantic magic on the back end but it is more immediately social.
Cli.gs has analytics and a new "geotargeting" feature, as you can see demonstrated in the video below.
Right Clig Demo from Pierre Far on Vimeo.
There Are Countless Alternatives to TinyURL
TinyURL obviously isn't too concerned about their uptime or else the problem wouldn't continue every single month. There are smarter alternatives all over the web and spreading the love around can't help but decrease load problems.
There are a number of "roll your own URL shortener" options and that is pretty classy - but for most of us just getting to know some alternatives would be a very good idea.
Comments
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Major #Care, Tinyurl links are used as temporary links by most of the people. Anyway, never had a single issue with TinyURL, believe it or not.
Posted by: John Lambo | November 27, 2008 9:01 AM
what's with the petty little (paid no doubt) half-hidden half-disguised add-links in the newsletters for d.openx.org.
Shit another one hits the 'what if we just take the piss a little and tweek our income' CRAP PILE! What's with it - just not gettin enough?
One more thing - it's very very rare I take the time to slate anyone on the net...
à dieu RWW from a very disappointed ex-subscriber.
Posted by: robson | November 27, 2008 9:25 AM
For what it's worth, I've never had a problem with tinyurl not working. In recent days, I've seen tweets that twurl.nl was not working, though.
Posted by: Ari Herzog | November 27, 2008 9:31 AM
Surely, by recommending other services that do the same thing you are not solving the problem. The main reason that TinyURL is down so much is most likely due to scaling issues relating to the fact that it is the most popular url shortening service. If everyone were to jump to another service, then the same problems would more than likely affect that service at some stage in the future!
At the same time this would do nothing to address the problems mentioned in your post regarding distrust of the link destination.
Posted by: David Dawnay | November 27, 2008 9:32 AM
I just reviewed Cli.gs yesterday from an affiliate marketer's point of view. Cli.gs is the best url shortener I've used for any reason, but for affiliate marketing - even for just one affiliate link you may use now and then - the benefits of using Cli.gs instead of the aff url are huge. Gave details as to why in the url link above. But as great as it is for everyone, it's twice as useful for anyone who has ever tried to make a buck off of an aff link. And yes, I've tried all the url shorteners, some are pretty good, but so far, cli.gs beats them all. (And no, I don't own cli.gs, i just love it).
Posted by: DazzlinDonna | November 27, 2008 9:33 AM
Surely, by recommending other services that do the same thing you are not solving the problem. The main reason that TinyURL is down so much is most likely due to scaling issues relating to the fact that it is the most popular url shortening service. If everyone were to jump to another service, then the same problems would more than likely affect that service at some stage in the future!
At the same time this would do nothing to address the problems mentioned in your post regarding distrust of the link destination.
Posted by: David Dawnay | November 27, 2008 9:33 AM
I am using BudURL rather than TinyURL as they offer more features than tinyurl...
Posted by: Kevin | November 27, 2008 9:34 AM
that cligs feature is utterly pointless, and their site is ugly.
I just use http://is.gd
Posted by: R Parks | November 27, 2008 10:02 AM
As an internet marketer, I've tried them all. I use http://zi.ma/ for it's SEO friendliness.
Posted by: Melanie Nathan | November 27, 2008 10:08 AM
creator of cli.gs is a good guy - I can't decide between cli.gs and tr.im ... both have merits.
Posted by: Peter Clark | November 27, 2008 10:10 AM
yeah cli.gs, snipurl, and budurl are cool. cli.gs is also seo friendly.
zi.ma is such a waste of time. anyone can buy the same script they got.
Posted by: henry | November 27, 2008 10:25 AM
Best short URL Service for me is http://tr.im
No question!
Posted by: web2marketing | November 27, 2008 10:37 AM
I've never had a real problem with tinyurl but I do agree, it's not meant to be a long term solutions. I always used it to send people huge test links etc.
Posted by: Christopher Ross | November 27, 2008 10:45 AM
Hmm interesting. I've never had a problem with TinyURL being down. But I don't use it all that much. I'll check out some alternatives and see what's out there.
Posted by: Cynthia | November 27, 2008 10:48 AM
I had a rather annoying experience this week that no one has really touched on. I sent out a tweet that included a shortened URL to an article. I then happen to follow the link myself the next day, only to find it now linking to some russian art site. Come to find out, the URL shortening service I used had a brief problem where a number of shortened URLs were accidentally reused. This completely broke the redirection for whoever these shortened URLs were originally issued to.
Fortunately it was just a blog post I was linking to in a twitter post. But imagine that it were something a little more official. Also imagine that it were reissued to someone who had it redirecting to a porn site. Now my memo that I just sent to the entire department includes a link that resolves to goatse. Scary thought.
Posted by: will.norris.name
|
November 27, 2008 11:57 AM
tr.im is a good one...
but I prefer using snipurl.com (aka snurl.com or snipr.com)
Posted by: D. | November 27, 2008 12:26 PM
Started using http://tr.im recently, one letter shorter than many others. I like how it provides some stats on links you pass through it
It seems all such services are subject to breaking your links...
Posted by: Alan Levine | November 27, 2008 2:20 PM
I hate TinyURL
for one reason it's blocked in my country :(
Posted by: saud | November 27, 2008 2:24 PM
Flecks sucks, its useless and a failed project
Posted by: BJay | November 27, 2008 3:10 PM
http://xaddr.com/ is other alternative to Tinyurl to make shorten URLs.
Posted by: venkat | November 27, 2008 10:35 PM
thnaks..
Posted by: büro mobilyaları | November 28, 2008 2:55 AM
Thank you for the alternatives to TinyURL
Posted by: EShare | November 28, 2008 4:03 AM
1) bit.ly is awesome
2) Choosing a non-dominant link-shortener could also be risky because who knows when the service will just go out of business (or whatever).
3) I tend to use these services for only one thing: to generate shortened links for the body of word processing documents. I place the full link in a footnote, so that it can always be recovered if needed.
Posted by: Chase Saunders | November 28, 2008 6:21 AM
Stop using TinyURL, stop reading shitty posts, log out, disconnect, get a life.
Posted by: mukzz | November 28, 2008 8:30 AM
+ for URLBarExt great FF extension & now will try Bit.ly !
Posted by: arnet | November 28, 2008 11:19 AM
And then there is http://shrt.st -- simple and clean and it comes with stats too, for example you can go to http://x.shrt.st/1w5 to see reverse lookup and click count.
Posted by: Shrt.st | November 28, 2008 12:51 PM
Personally, I am currently using a new service called Adjix.com. It lets you post to Twitter and a one click shortened bookmarklet for everything else. It also allows you to pick if you want to show affiliate ads or not.
Posted by: Anita Cohen-Williams | November 28, 2008 2:58 PM
URL shortening services are an interesting beast. Bottom line is that yes they are here to stay and no, there is no way to make any money with them.
That said, why the fascination with shorter and shorter domains for URL shortening?
In the end, any web site can be a URL shortener. RWW could use one of the shorter domain names they own and create short url'ss for every link in a post of theirs. Search engines can become url shorteners. Your personal blog can be a url shortener.
I think in a few years we will look back and laugh that we actually used web sites who's sole purpose was to shorten url's.
Posted by: Jmartens | November 28, 2008 9:46 PM
I haven't noticed any problem with TinyURL myself.
I'd try one of those other services if it indeed was a problem for others, except none of them have a Firefox extension and I'm not going through the extra step of landing on their page when I'm so used to just right-clicking.
I'll be watching for it though, thanks.
Posted by: BillyG | November 28, 2008 11:36 PM
TinyURL was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier, and may only be used for actual URLs. Using it for spamming or illegal purposes is forbidden and any such use will result in the TinyURL being disabled and you may be reported to all ISPs involved and to the proper governmental agencies. This service is provided without warranty of any kind.
Date with Googlebot, Part II: HTTP status codes and If-Modified-Since!!
Posted by: Kaleny | November 29, 2008 10:17 AM
You should also try http://cozyurl.com I made in 2 hours, I might open-source it if there's enough demand.
Posted by: max | November 30, 2008 1:29 PM
Here's an other one: http://low.cc. You can get stats for all your links if you sign in with an OpenID.
Posted by: Pascal | December 5, 2008 1:58 PM