Tag Archives: url shortening

Twitter into URL shortening business too?

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Bit.ly, Is.gd, Tr.im, Hop.im and a lot more. Goo.gl too. Now? It’s Finally Twitter! Twitter, the massive microblogging platform the popularized the whole concept of URL shortening starting with TinyUrl.com because people wanted to share URLs which were well above 140 Characters and so they needed something to shrink it and they also need some space to describe it, so this gave birth to URL Shrinking revolution.

But this recently has taken a turn and as been contributing to a lot of Spam and phishing taking place on Twitter via Direct Messages because the biggest advantage of having a shortened URL is that you can hide the destination location of the url so people can be fooled easily by describing the link with some text giving a misinterpretation of what it would lead to while, it leads to some poker or a warez website which is a scam or something.

From now, all the direct messages and Email Notifications from Twitter will have links shortened from Twt.tl and this will help Twitter monitor URLs and prevent such fishing attacks. Here’s a excerpt from their blog post,

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.

It surely points that in no time, we will have all replies with twt.tl links too, who knows?

Tr.im got back on it’s feet : Questions surround trim now

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Recently Tr.im had decided to shut down and they also posted that all links would stop working after 31st of December. It looked as if they were damn serious. 

The news spread like fire and within a day the blog-o-sphere and the Twit-o-sphere was hot with news and view of people and readers putting on their comments. Some actually started lamenting for the service ( I didn’t).

But now Tr.im is back, the reason that has been stated that shutting down of tr.im created great outcry in the blogging community and so Tr.im had come back.

Many analysts thought that this was a Pr Stunt and so did i. Tr.im also stated that Tr.im will continue to function as it used to and so will the API. But surely this will give a boost to the url shortening service.

Trim is still looking for someone to acquire it and if i am not wrong then Trim might soon find it’s new owner. Lets see what happens!

URL shortener tr.im shuts down

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The Nambu network; owners of tr.im, a URL shortener, has announced that the service will be shut down as from today.

Recently, the service has gone through many outages and the ‘fail banana’(yes, a banana) has been seen frequently.

The reasons stated are that it’s impossible to monetize it and bit.ly has won the URL shortener ‘war’ since it was announced as the default shortener for links on Twitter. They say that “We made our best efforts to sell tr.im before this announcement.”. Personally, I think that it’s really unfair that they didn’t allow users to export their statistics before closing the service. The links will work until at least December 31 2009.

I agree with the first statement as it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to monetize it. For example, if they decide to insert ads on redirected  pages, people will flock to the plethora of ad-free URL shorteners. However, I don’t agree with the second as I believe that as long as people are using a service, it has a chance of becoming popular: Two years ago, TinyURL was the ‘king’ of URL shorteners, today it’s bit.ly, next year it could be another, who knows?

The service had many advantages, namely:

  • A killer domain name.
  • Good and beautifully-presented statistics.
  • A Firefox add-on.

If you were a frequent user and are looking for an alternative service or you just want to try something new, please checkout the Etiole Network’s very own URL shortener Hop.im.

P.S. I’m Saajid Vawda(sjdvda), one of the new writers on Etiole, you can visit my blog or you can follow me on Twitter.