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A Bit of Background
URL shortener services have been around for many years now. TinyURL probably pioneered this type of applications about ten years ago. URL shortening had been (and, still are) considered “evil” and they had been stigmatized. This was mainly due to the fact that short URLs are generally “opaque”. URL shortening effectively obfuscates all the information present in the plain URL (e.g., its domain name, the text contained in the URL path, etc.). Despite this, URL shortening got extremely popular, primarily due to the increasing popularity of microblogging sites such as Twitter.
Timing
I’ve been recognizing the need for “safe URL shorteners” for a while. I’ve been seriously thinking about creating one, at least for the last couple of years. When Twitter became really popular a few years ago, there were literally hundreds of URL shortening services, which obviously discouraged me in attempting to create yet another service. Then came along bit.ly. Bit.ly’s meteoric rise for the last couple of years was astonishing, and it was another reason why I was reluctant to invest any time in creating a URL shortener service (although I believed, and still believe, that the vision I have is very different from those of existing services). Big companies such as Google then forayed into this field as well (mainly due to the importance of tracking these short URLs for analytics purposes). This was yet another deterrence for me. In any case, I started working on this idea of “safe URL shortener” as a side project some time early last year, still believing in that it would be useful to many people.
Irony
Earlier this year, Twitter started its own URL shortening service (t.co). This literally meant elimination of big (in fact, major) chunk of “market” for other URL shortening services. Very few could now remain viable services, including bit.ly, etc. Flash URL Shortener was never meant to be for profit, but the same seemed to apply to all URL shortener services whether they were commercial or not-for-profit. It also appeared that t.co seemed, at least on the surface, to eliminate or reduce some of the concerns I had (or, many people had) regarding the “safety” of obfuscated URLs, although it wasn’t entirely clear what Twitter’s intention was from its limited rollout earlier this year. I put my “safe URL shortening” project on hold.
A few days ago, for some weird reason (which I cannot recall at this point), I decided to finish up what I had implemented so far and “release” it. It felt like it was now or never. I had some substantial work done and it appeared that some of the features could be easily polished and packaged. I worked almost non-stop for the last few days. Early this morning, I released the “first public beta” of Flash URL, http://mq.ms/ (and, its “sister app”). Also Chrome URL shortener extension: http://z.mq.ms/flashurl.
I took a short nap. The moment I got up, I checked my services. Then, to my surprise, I realized that Twitter must have “more broadly” rolled out t.co. I am not sure if it’s general deployment. But, at least as far as my Twitter account is concerned, all links on my Twitter stream have been automatically converted to t.co. It wasn’t like that last night. Talk about irony. After a couple of years of on-and-off development, I finally decided, and picked one day to “release” my work, to share the app with other people, and that was the first day I could not even see my shortened URLs, the “fruit” of my work, in my own Twitter stream.
I still believe in “safe Web browsing” and all that. It just got a bit harder to “market”, but I think people will eventually find and use services which they find genuinely useful.
Whaaaat?
Postscript: After another quick nap :), I just saw that all links were back on my Twitter stream. What happened? They all still go through t.co (through redirection), but they are at least not displayed as t.co. What happened? Was it just a bug? Was I dreaming? ;) In any case, visually changing all display links to t.co simply does not make sense, me thinks. Earlier today when I saw all these monotonous t.co links displayed on my stream (in every single post), I felt like I was watching a scene from the movie, Being John Malkovich. ;)
A “flash URL” is a URL that points to one Web site but redirects to another site (or, “flashes”) after a certain preset amount of time (e.g., 10 seconds).
A flash URL can be useful for displaying small amount of information before the user is redirected to the main/target Web page.
Flash URL Shortener has just been publicly released. It’s labeled as “beta”, but we believe that it’s fully functional (as far as the core URL shortening functionality is concerned) and we are confident of its high quality (zero known defects at the time of release :)).
We’ll be adding more features over time. Please give it a try and let us know what you think at @flashurl on Twitter or through email at info@flashurl.com.
(Note: Flash URL is hosted on Google App Engine (GAE). GAE “penalizes” free tier apps when they are idle. You’ll likely encounter some long latencies and occasional 404 errors within the next few days or weeks following the initial release, probably until Flash URL gets some traction. Please be patient, and be reminded that these are temporary errors.)
Create a flash URL, instantly. (Coming soon.)
