Internet software companies to build database of short URLs

Jake Widman
Saturday, 15 August 2009 04:40

Your IT - Home IT

In the wake of the near-demise of URL shortening service tr.im, Web filtering company Gnip and other firms have pledged to build a persistent short-URL directory.

Earlier this week, Nambu announced its intention to shut down its tr.im URL shortening service at the end of the year.

The next day, the company changed its mind, pledging to "keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely."

But the Nambu blog post that made that pledge reiterated the company's warning that Twitter's embrace of rival shortening service bit.ly had created a "monopoly" that has "stacked the URL shortening business opportunity overwhelmingly in bit.ly’s favour."

The threat that other URL shortening companies could disappear -- and with them the links from the shortened URLs to the original pages -- is what prompted the companies involved to launch the directory initiative.

Most companies involved are either URL shorteners themselves, investors in URL shorteners, or content trackers that need to be able to follow short URLs.

In the first group are Adjix, URLizer.com, the open source project urlShort, and bit.ly itself.

In the second is the betaworks, which owns stakes in bit.ly, Tweetdeck, and Twitter, and supports the website that will host the directory

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