TR.IM and URL Shortening
With this weeks news about the new URL Shortening service TR.IM closing down, many folks have started to wonder which URL shortening service they should be using to guarantee that they won't lose their old shortened URL's. The quick answer is that their is no guarantee. No URL shortening service has really come up with a good monetization technique, if one is really even possible. The closest, of course, would be bit.ly, but even that is iffy at best.
So what are the options? Depends, how important are your links? If they're just for Twitter and it's time relevant, it might not be that important that your URL redirects to original link years later. If it's for business purposes, perhaps you should either not use a URL redirect, or use your own. It doesn't take much these days to buy a relatively short domain and install your own URL redirect script. You'll most likely need a foreign domain of course, don't expect a .com - why not use that .net or .info of your domain everyone talked us into buying. The advantage of this method is that your URL's always redirect as long as you're in business. The disadvantage is that automated twitter clients will not automatically parse the url, so people might be less trusting to click on the link (except your regular customers, of course). If you're a big news site, this is definitely the way to go. We've seen this approach done with the digg.com site recently. If you're hosting a wordpress blog site, like I do here, the answer is really simple. In your settings - permalinks section, change it to Custom and enter /%post_id% . This creates a short url with your own domain. The down side is that you no longer have the pretty SEO friendly links. Since it hasn't been truly proven that these so called 'SEO friendly URLs' are truly applicable these days, that most likely is not an issue. Other sites have implemented their own variations of short urls. The site Populate.net creates a shorter (admittedly not short) URL of every article submitted to their directory and retweets them with the short url. Here's a great blog post I found while researching scripts, if you're technically inclined.
