yuanhsh's blog: All about URL shorteners
All about URL shorteners
Internet applications don't always need to be full of features or cover all aspects of your Internet life to be successful. Sometimes it's ok to be simple and just focus on providing a single feature. It doesn't even need to be earth-shatteringly important—it should be just useful enough for its target users. The archetypical and probably most extreme example of this is the URL shortening application or URL shortener.
This service offers a very simple but surprisingly useful feature. It provides a shorter URL that represents a normally longer URL. When a user goes to the short URL, he will be redirected to the original URL. For this simple feature, top three most popular URL shortening services (TinyURL, bit.ly, and is.gd) collectively had about 11 million unique visitors, 110 million page views and a reach of about one percent of the Internet in June 2009. In 2008, the most popular URL shortener at that time, TinyURL, was made one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Best Websites.
The idea to shorten long and unwieldy URLs into shorter, more manageable ones has been around for some time. One of the earlier attempts to make it a public service is Make A Shorter Link (MASL), which appeared around July 2001. MASL did just that, though the usefulness was debatable as the domain name was long and the shortened URL could potentially be longer than the original.
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