I Want a Twitter Domain .twt

Image via CrunchBase

Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post today on the news that the short URL company tr.im is closing its doors and that all the short URLs which people created may, potentially, be lost as of December 2009.

Here’s the beginning of Robert’s blog post and then my comment, which I left on his blog. This is a fascinating issue with ramifications in a number of other areas of the internet (e.g. OpenID). Be sure to click through to Robert’s full blog post before reading my response.

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BLOG POST by Robert Scoble

So, now, Tr.im’s parent company, Nambu, has announced that the URL shortening service known as tr.im is turning off its service and that links will stop working after December 31. Here’s the news on Techmeme.

What will this do? Well, first of all, any stats are gone. Bam. Second of all, all Tr.im URLs will stop working at the end of the year. Bam. (In an email to me, Nambu’s CEO said that links could be extended past December 31, but he wouldn’t guarantee it).

OK, most of you probably never have used tr.im to shorten your URLs so they fit into Twitter. But I did. I liked the URL better than bit.ly, which is the service that Twitter has “blessed.” Oh, how I hate Twitter’s “blessing.” This is a company that is building a channel for celebrities, bots, spammers, and a few of other types who like to tell each other short sweet nothings but really wants to be a platform for the world’s people, APIs, devices, etc to talk with each other.

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COMMENT by me:

Here’s 2 potential solutions:

A.) What if the short URL companies offered two additional features:

1. As a premium feature let customers use domains, which they already own as the base domain for the short URL. For example, instead of bit.ly producing a short URL such as:

http://bit.ly/hksl

you were able to substitue the based domain (bit.ly) with your own domain (scobleizer.com)?

http://scobleizer.com/hksl

2. Short URL companies opened up “the walled garden” by offering an export option. The export would include the short URL with your domain, which wouldn’t need to change even if it were imported into another service and the destination URL, which should also remain the same.

You already own your domain and with a simple export file you then own the data. It shouldn’t be too hard for a new company to create an import feature which would “relink” the short URL with the destination URL.

Now you have peace of mind. As with most of these issues, the key variable is the the web services is built using a domain which you already own.

The short URL companies could partner with domain registrar’s and create a new revenue stream by selling domains to people.

B.) Twitter, itself, were to create a new domain, such as .twt. Based on what Jason Calacanis said on TWiT, I would not be surprised to see Twitter try to either create or buy a domain for itself.

Were this to happen, users would have the option of keeping their standard http://twitter.com/scobleizer username or they could purchase their very own domain, such as http://scobleizer.twt

As Jason hypothesized, Twitter wants to become the phone book of the internet. In order to do that each users needs to have a unique identifier. Your telephone number served that function, obviously, in the “old world.”

However, users of Twitter are going to be very suspect and reticent to use Twitter’s own domain as their unique identifier. For the very reasons Robert highlights in this post, such trust by users would be foolish.

Therefore, the only true solution would be for user’s to own their unique identifier (i.e. domain). Twitter would be smart to become a registrar as soon as possible or at least do a deal with the folks that own the .tel domain

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tr.im closes, says Twitter partly to blame (macworld.com)
• Tr.im URL Shortener Shuts Down; Short Links to Die? (mashable.com)
• The Tragedy Of URL Shortners And Why Twitter Should Buy Bit.ly (cloudave.com)
• tr.im Throws In the Towel (techcrunch.com)
• Anybody know the Tr.im URL shortener people? (rafer.tumblr.com)

Tagged as: Jason Calacanis, openid, Robert Scoble, twitter, URL redirection