

Goo.gl Challenges Bit.ly as King of the Short - devilangel
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/googl-challenges-bitly-as-king-of-the-short/?ref=technology

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blhack
I guess I still don't understand the purpose of URL shortners. Isn't this what
markup is for?

Hey, check out this <a
href='http;//www.example.com/foo/bar/foo/?param1=foo&param2=bar&key=foo&page=bar&something&something&something'>
page!</a>

I get it that twitter has the 140 character limit, but isn't this something
twitter should have solved themselves?

Why do these news articles seem to pop up every other day? Why is bit.ly
offering a "pro" service?

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ja30278
Especially when they are trivially easy to create. [shameless plug] I created
an appengine variant ( <http://symlinkd.com> ) in about a day, including a
simple update api and per-handle history [/shameless plug]

~~~
pronoiac
That's funny - I was thinking about setting up an appengine to archive the URL
shorteners, to minimize fallout when they fall over.

------
VMG
only for google products at the moment

~~~
ssn
Not quite. From Google's PR: "Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone
service; you can't use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL
Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the
service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider
audience in the future."

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-
shorter-f...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-for-
google-toolbar.html)

