Well, as a few people who actually come here may know, I’ve started using Twitter and Facebook. I held off for a long time, but I got curious, so I set up accounts.
Twitter…not much happening there. I have a few followers, most of them spammers. I only have two legit followers. Facebook, however, has exploded. No more than an hour passed before I had friends on FB…family I haven’t seen in years. Now, most of my high school classmates, and many friends, co-workers, and acquaintances are now on my FB friend list. It’s amazing.
But I started having issues when I went to post links. A lot of links (especially blog and article posts) have extremely long URLs (web addresses). Since Twitter can only have 140 characters per post, I started looking at URL shorteners. The problem was one of stability and longevity. The shortener services out there are having scaling problems. Too many people shortening too many URLs. So I rolled out my own. I picked up a short domain name, and downloaded a shortener script called Lessn. The domain “smlnk.us” (short for Small Link Us) was available AND on sale! So now, I can simply create a short link for some of those ginormous links out there. An example is http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/. I used this as a test. It’s very large. Now, the short link: http://smlnk.us/1. Not bad, eh? If you already have a nice webhosting package, it really makes sense to roll out your own URL shortener service. It removes the problem of a third party site going down unexpectedly, or removing your links.