ReadWriteWeb

In late October, after Bit.ly had firmly established itself as Twitter's service of choice, it looked like URL shortener service Cligs would close down. As of today, the company will see a new management team as social bookmarking service Mister Wong has agreed to acquire it for an undisclosed sum.

URL shortener and social media analytics service Bit.ly just announced the availability of a new domain for shortening URLs, J.mp. J.mp offers all the same features Bit.ly does, but we believe it has two advantages.

Not only is it shorter, the new name is more literally communicative of what the service does. Click on it and you will J.mp [jump] to a new link. It's nice and literal like the old classic tinyURL, though most people don't know what URLs are. J.mp is so friendly it makes Bit.ly look like a way to catch a bit-delivered virus. J.mp might be the best URL shortener name yet. How do those Bit.ly guys do it?

Updated at 12:45 PM PST with a response from Bit.ly

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.

Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there's sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

Social serendipity service StumbleUpon began opening up its new URL shortening service this morning and we have 250 invites included below. StumbleUpon is great for two things: discovering fabulous new websites and getting waves of traffic sent to sites you publish. The new URL service is indeed quite Su.pr (that's its name) but we wonder if it will lead to such an influx of publisher-submitted content that content submitted by users because it's cool will have more noise to compete with.

For publishers the service looks very cool, it includes features we haven't seen anywhere else and offers access to the huge Stumble audience.