Url shorteners are services which shrinks a URL to a shorter one.
Why do you need this? Sometimes for aesthetics to hide a long string of 40 to 50 characters and make the link presentable(like in a presentation?).
And for the more obvious reason :) of using the link in Twitter which slaps a 146 character limit on the face of twitter users.
Already there are umpty number of url shorteners like tinyurl, tiny.cc, is.gd, bit.ly, then what is there in lnk.by?
All the services do what they say. They shrink the urls but of all the available url shorteners including Lnk.by, Bit.ly seems to be more sophesticated, enabling the publisher to track the usage pattern, history of links shrunk etc.,
But where all url shorteners fail, Lnk.by wins by a mile. All services cater the publishers who use the service, but Lnk.by actually answers the need of the readers who click the link.
When you shrink a link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o) in to
http://tinyurl.com/384n2f or
http://is.gd/8L1 or
http://tiny.cc/w23AC or
http://bit.ly/27OtIV, it doesn't make any sense to the reader.
It brings a kind of 'Oh! no! what the heck is this link' kind of feeling as soon as you see one, if no proper accompanying description is given.
But when the same link is shrunk using Lnk.by, we get, http://WACH.it/caf. Oh yeah, now the shrunk link makes sense, there is a video in there...
You need not do anything, just paste the url and say go and the Lnk.by detects almost all sites and say whether it is an article to read, a video to watch or a picture to see and shrinks them accordingly.
Lnkby is still in alpha and hence there could be a few kinks (but I didn't notice any for a few urls which I tested).
This is just a beginning of a new idea, later on, just like some famous sites have their own shortening services, to enable readers realize that it is their website to which the shortened url directs to,some service in future could shrink all websites' url and com eup with a service, say instead of youtube - yt.cc/abc and for flickr - flkr.c0m/abc1 etc., :)(far call?)....i think not :)
This would tell the readers not only what kind of content they are going to but also where they are going.
I am presently using tinyurl. Going to give Lnk.by a try, what do you use? Any thoughts?
8 comments:
Cheers for the write up. Glad you like the service.
We're trying to get some native Twitter Clients to integrate with the service such as TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and Tweetie. The feedback we're received so far has been great and we're adding features. We now have 'twitpic' like functionality via the API. Images can be uploaded and then viewed like so: http://seee.it/cq
Thanks again.
@tomnewton @LNKby
That is right. Tiny urls generated by most services are ok, if you do not use them in isolation. Then, they end up looking like gibberish, not the best of things for a presentation. The trick is to find a more sophisticated one,that will look bonafide also. However, this should also be a fail- safe one, i.e. one that can be used even in case one server fails.
that was very informative - assuming it was unbiased ;)
@tomnewton - more analytics features like bit.ly would be a great addon. Thanks 4 stopping by.
@purba @prashant - Thanks 4 ur comments.
This service should gain popularity since this gives a meaning to the URI as compared to other services.
Good Blog dude...
Yeah, it is pretty new and already it is getting noticed a lot.
Thanks Hemal, for dropping by and for leaving your thoughts here...
good post, this service looks interesting.
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Read the link below and nominate your blog. Please vote for me also. and inform me about your nomination so i can vote for you ty.
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@sm thanks sm for your review and comments.
I ll do it and ll let you know. For now as such I don't have such aspirations. However, I would vote. lemme know.
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