Monthly Archives: August 2009

Pingdom Ranks URL Shorteners

Pingdom has tested the major URL shorteners for speed and stability, in the aftermath of the Tr.im fiasco, with interesting yet unsurprising results.

One thing that has surprised us a bit here at Pingdom is that we haven’t seen any real numbers on how reliable and how fast these different URL shorteners are compared to each other. After all, adding a layer on top of the target URL (the direct link) means slower access and also adds a single point of failure, so these things should matter.

The top five overall are Ow.ly, Bit.ly, Is.gd, Su.pr, and TinyURL. Tr.im came in dead last. Ow.ly beat-out Bit.ly because of a brief downtime during the period that the study took place.

On a related note, I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about losing their trust in URL shorteners. My response is to go with Bit.ly or Ow.ly if you’re that worried about longevity. Why? They both (Bit.ly especially) seem to have long-term goals and eventual monetization plans. They’re serious about what they do, and they’re not some fly-by-night operation that could disappear. Bit.ly, I would say, will probably be around as long as Twitter. They have serious funding, from some of the same people who fund Twitter even, Twitter uses them as their default shortener, and they have a grand scheme for the future.

Project Retweet: Twitter is Adding Native Retweet Support

If you follow social media coverage much, you’ve probably heard already through Mashable or TechCrunch: Twitter is rethinking the retweet, and integrating native API calls for retweeting into the service.

Remember WP.com? Meet the WP.me URL Shortener

Automattic has acquired another wicked-short domain name: WP.me. Not only is it a WordPress.com-specific URL shortener, but it is the only two-letter .me domain in the world, for the time being anyway. There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when…

BlogBuzz August 15, 2009

HTML Text Over an Image

Have you ever seen a site where HTML text is rendered over an image? One example of this is Pro Blog Design‘s article headings. The effect looks good, and it’s search engine-friendly. CSS-Tricks has a tutorial on how to create a similar implementation with…

WP.com Step 1: “Get WordPress”

Automattic recently acquired WP.com for their WordPress.com hosted blog service, as you may remember. They still don’t seem to have quite decided what to do with it, aside from redirecting it to WordPress.com. Users seem to want their blogs to be available as subdomains…

Tr.im: No, We’re Not Closing After All…

Remember all the hoopla about Tr.im closing down their service? Well, they changed their mind. We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep…

Poll: What Are Your Favorite URL Shorteners?

If you use Twitter, you probably use URL shortening services every day. If not, you probably still find a use for one now and then. You may shorten a long address down so you can read it over the phone (or in a podcast),…

Tr.im URL Shortening Service to Shut Down

Nambu Networks has announced that they will be shutting down their Tr.im URL shortener. New links are no longer being created, and existing short URLs will cease to function on December 31, 2009. Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the…

BlogBuzz August 8, 2009