A native Bostonian, now living, working and enjoying life in Krasnodar Krai.

Konektiv Media

A native Bostonian now living, working, and enjoying life in Krasnodar Krai. I work with Russian companies to develop and manage social media strategies and campaigns. Please feel free to contact me directly if you or your company is interested in Russian social media, Krasnodar, or the 2014 Sochi Olympics Games.

It’s Su.pr to be Short

by TGP on 2009/08/06

If you use a web app like Twitter or a social network, like Facebook, you probably already know about URL shortening services (here’s the Wikipedia entry explaining URL shortening). There are literally hundreds of URL shortening services available today. For proof, see this article on Mashable.com from this past January.

Like most people, I started with TinyURL.com and all I cared about was that the long ungainly URL was sufficiently shortened so I could copy/paste it into Twitter.com and not waste too many of the 140 characters that Twitter limits each tweet (i.e. sms message). I eventually added a browser javascript bookmarklet to my browser bar so that I could even more quickly shorten a URL of a website I wanted to share. This is how things stayed for about a year and a half. Then recently, I began to hear about additional URL shortening features, such as analytics, and I made the switch to bit.ly.

Bit.ly analytics feature is great when you want to go back and check-out which URLs, and by definition tweets (I tend not to gum up my FB account by sharing links), have been clicked by readers. Additionally, I also began to find myself wanting to add website page links (shortened URLs) to multiple Twitter accounts (I have over 10 right now) and it became a nightmare to create multiple TinyURL accounts for each Twitter acount. Bit.ly gives you the option of registering as many Twitter accounts as you need.

I have been using Bit.ly now for a couple months and thought that I would stick with it for a while longer but a new URL shortener just came across my radar screen and it has a killer feature. The new company is called su.pr and it was created by the guys over at StumbleUpon.com. StumbleUpon, itself, is an interesting web service, which I had completely forgotten about until earlier this year when I kept noticing that it was the third most popular source of referals to this blog in my Google Analytics.

Every week when I checked my Google Analytics report I would scratch my head and wonder what’s up with this StumbleUpon. While I had signed-up for the service ages ago (I think in 2004), I had hardly ever used it. The last week I was listening to my newest favorite podcast called Net at Night with Leo Laporte and Amber McCarthy and they intereviewed Garrett Camp, the founder of StubleUpon and just as I was about to fast-forward to the next episode they started talking about su.pr. I’m sure glad I didn’t hit the fast forward icon!

Su.pr literally just opened up its beta up to the public and while it still is a bit rough around the edges, it lets users do something amazing. Specifically, su.pr users can now use their very own domains as URLs with which su.pr will shorten a URL. What this means is that instead of a URL like su.pr/fjsk, I can use my own domain (timothypost.com) and the URL will display as timothypost.com/fsjk.

Here’s the full explanantion on su.pr’s website. Also, here’s Tim Ferriss’ review of su.pr (I assume he’s an investor, which is cool since Tim is one of my favorite Web 2.0 “celebrities”) By the way, if you haven’t yet “discovered Tim Ferriss, I highly recommend you start to follow his blog and Twitter account.

Obviously, my own domain is 14 characters versus su.pr’s 4 characters so it slightly eats a bit more of the Twitter “real estate.” Nonetheless, as far as I know su.pr is the only URL shortener to offer this custom URL option. Please note that many services offer a custom path (the suffix after the .com or dot whatever) option. However, a while a custom path on a shortened URL is easy on the eyes it is not the same as a custom domain.

There’s a couple very good reasons why you might want to sacrifice brevity (i.e. 10 characters) for a custom domain. The first is basic security. Today when you see a shortened URL you don’t know who created it and it can easily point somewhere where you don’t want to go. When you use your own domain readers can be sure that it’s really you and if they already trust you then they can also trust the URL you have created.

Secondly, even though you are using your own domain as the shortener, su.pr still uses a 301 redirect so the original link is the one Google, or other search engines, use in their rankings.

Third, it offers you or your clients the opportunity to install the Wordpress plugin and it will automatically create a shortened URL for your blog post or article with which readers can use if they share it with others.

Fourth, it helps you promote your content by automatically submitting each link into the StumbleUpon community and also you can activate a feature called, Promoted Website, within your su.pr Dashboard. What that does (see Tim’s video below also) is when someone clicks one of your su.pr shortened links a small sidebar will appear within the browser window on the page you send them to and it will give people the option of clicking through to other related articles you designate.

While the URL shortener space is still very fluid and while it is possible that I will be enticed away from su.pr in the future, at the moment I am loving su.pr and suggest that you give it a spin to see if it’s right for your needs.

Here a short video of Tim Ferriss’ talking about su.pr: