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The list of URL shorteners just got shorter.
According to a blog post by Nambu, the company is shutting its doors on URL shortening tool, Tr.im. After a number of attempts to sell the service, no companies in the Twitter space stepped forward to purchase and operate it in its existing form. Says the company, "There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner."
And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!
Digg, the popular social news site, just launched its long awaited DiggBar, a new toolbar that will appear on any page Digg links to. From within the toolbar, users can digg stories and share them with their friends on Twitter and Facebook. Digg will now also feature shortened URLs, and, maybe even more interestingly, Digg now also displays how many times a story has been clicked through from Digg.In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.
Link shortening services are so common you can't throw a stone online without hitting one, but TinyURL is the undisputed champ. It's one of the oldest, its name says what it does and despite repeated outages - its downtime is small enough that millions of people keep using it.
TinyURL has also allowed incomprehensible amounts of value, both in terms of technology and in terms of money, to sit on the table unclaimed. For years. Now a group of some of the web's hottest investors are betting a few million dollars that a smart TinyURL competitor called Bit.ly can take advantage of being the conduit through which millions of people visit sites of interest to them.
Even though we live in an age of instant Qik streams, video chats on Skype, and micro-blogging on Twitter, sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.
TinyURL, one of the most popular URL-shortening services (although not our favorite) is now being used by cybercriminals to redirect web surfers to pages that contain viruses, trojans, and other sorts of malware. According to Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center, these criminals are using the service to avoid having their web sites flagged by the Safe Browsing mechanisms built in to modern web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.
Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're no strangers to URL shortening services. We use them all of the time - and we're proponents of using something other than TinyURL. But with the vast array of URL shortening services out there, it generally takes something interesting to turn our heads. Now, a new URL shortener called Krunchd has done just that, by providing a feature that has less to do with shortening URLs and more to do with how we communicate with URLs on a regular basis.
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.
URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.
Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers.
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