The URL Shortening bandwagon

URL shortening service has been around for a few years now. The earliest I remember is that of seeing many links on certain websites starting with <tinyurl> and wondering what exactly does that mean.

URL shortening essentially provides a web page with a URL much shorter than it’s native length. So for example http://www.inficone.com/abc/xyz/mmm/w/index/pages/x.html could just be represented by http://tinyurl.com/infi.

But what is the real gain

Easy to read and remember. In fact they look more professional.
Information regarding many such URLs could be made concise instantly eg when posting on to forums or email. ( You must have noticed that sometimes a URL that spans across multiple lines causes issue in showing up on the recipient’s PC, as only the first line of the URL gets used for addressing the URL )
Services like messengers or twitter make every character count in the post. So having a shorter URL would ensure enough space for communicating rest of the information.
In case you want to change destination URL( native one ) of the short URL, you just need to make change at one place and the short links published all across the web would automatically point to the new content.
If the URL shortening service provides you with statistics related to number of hits, geographical location of readers etc – it could be useful for your business.
Since the original URL is not visible for interpretation, hackers make use of short URLs to redirect people to the sites of their choice.

The older players in this area have been tinyurl and bit.ly. Off late a lot of players are making their foray in this area

Facebook with fb.me
Google with goo.gl ( Don’t worry Google hasn’t shifted its headquarters to Greenland !! )
Youtube with youtu.be

So what exactly is the business model here?

Apparently the companies think that they could offer this as a premium service and once you get trapped with a lot of short URLs all across the web with a good reader base, you will be better off paying to them than to go and change each and every link. Google might have additional advertising interest based on profiling of the URLs.

Do note that URL shortening ends up providing one extra level of indirection to the URL and just in case the service provider of the short URL service goes down( even if the native URL is up ) – your readers wont be able to access the page.

The main motivation and usage today of this service seems to be centered around twitter. However, what if tomorrow twitter decides to increase it’s character limit OR do a URL shortening of it’s own?

But regardless of all this, everyone seems to be joining this bandwagon today. Lets see how the market finally shapes up and who turns up to be the leader in the area.

Do share your thoughts on where you think this business is heading.

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