As an increasing number of consumers and marketers seek to take advantage of the myriad opportunities presented by today's social networking scene, where sharing links and media via MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other services has become commonplace, visitors to these sites find themselves often desperately trying to make heads or tails of a long URL — which may have been erroneously truncated by the website's software — preventing the user from locating a valid resource online; even if they could successfully type in all of that gobbledygook.
The need being obvious, the solution was simple: provide an easy online interface that allows users to input their often too long and awkward website address and receive a short, sweet and tidy new address in return. Services such as TinyURL.com, Bit.ly, Short.ie and Tr.im sprang up to fill the demand, as did many others; some of which offer custom name aliasing, traffic reports and more.
These simple redirection services allow for snappy branding possibilities along with the ease of telling, mailing, posting and tweeting a very easy to transcribe series of typically 20 characters or less — ideal for Twitter users and other apps that have character limits imposed on messages.
Unfortunately for the owners of these services, they face the same challenge as do the owners of the sites where these shortened URLs are displayed: how do you make a buck?
"Like Twitter, a great service that has yet to make money, the short-link services are great products that don't yet generate sizable revenues," Rafe Needleman, a technology editor and publisher, wrote. "Chances are that one or two might — Bit.ly, for example — but the rest of the URL shorteners are rather doomed as businesses, even though people may like them a whole lot."
Bit.ly is reportedly the only redirection service to be currently supported by Twitter, sparking acquisition rumors and fears of an inevitable monopoly within the marketspace.
Operator's financial concerns and the instability that they bring are not the only issue to draw the attention of critics to shortened URL services, however, as the complexity of adding millions of URLs that are nothing more than pointers to other URLs adds to the already sizeable overhead of the Internet. And if, as some fear, many of these services go out of business, this abundance of extra data will be comprised of nothing but dead links pointing to broken dreams — degrading the "freshness" of the Internet.
As with many ecommerce ventures, the shortened URL services are run with varying degrees of competence, budget and finesse; guaranteeing a consolidation / reduction in the number of these services and posing a longevity problem for webmasters using them — a choice that may have seemed good when you wanted to hide that affiliate link, but now seems unwise when that carefully promoted link is now a "404."
Experts such as Dublin-based social media consultant Krishna De are advising marketers concerned with the persistence of their URLs to simply use their own domain name, or one obtained for short-URL marketing purposes, despite the cost-cutting appeal of free shortening services.
"Small businesses in particular can be reliant on free services like this," De said, "And when you don't own it, and don't back it up, that's a problem."