Most people, by now, must know how Tiny URL works. You want to point someone to a web page but the URL is about 50 characters long.
But go to tinyurl.com, paste the URL in and it'll give you a new, short web address. Bob's your Dad's brother.
I recently packed in Tiny URL in favour of snurl.com. Click-efficiency conscious as I am, Snurl automatically sticks the new, short URL on your clipboard so you can paste more quickly.
Dave Winer just posted a note about this, recognising that newspapers are increasingly using short URLs to direct newspaper readers to their website. While the advantages are obvious, he said they are missing a trick in creating short links in-house.
"If they used their own web address they could monitor traffic, see how many clicks each location in the paper generated. Maybe stories on the op-ed page generate more clicks than those on the front page? Maybe stories by Ms. Jones get more clicks than those by Mr. Smith? There's also a chance to reinforce the brand, and drive more traffic to your site as opposed to tinyurl.com. And it's good for the web, because it helps keep us from centralizing too much on one site. Lots of reasons to put up your own url shortener."
The New York Times, he suggests, could easily have its own short urls, like http://nyt.us/7h
It makes so much sense. These kind of developments are relatively tiny, but really important. So many functions on news sites could be tidied up with more tech people on board.
Source: scripting.com
Technorati Tags: DaveWiner, snurl, tinyurl
