Interesting choice of TLD. I can only assume this means they'll be sure to conform to all relevant Libyan law, since it only takes one court order to pull their domain registration. (Cf. <a href="http://nic.ly/regulations.php" rel="nofollow">http://nic.ly/regulations.php</a>)
Every time I hear something about URL shortners, a part of me dies inside.<p>My Thoughts: Twitter is the main reason for the increase in URL Shortners. Instead of depending on outside services, Twitter should (must) implement their own shortning service. Something like !02u389 or ^02u389 that maps to a real URL. (like their #hastags and @replies)
What's particularly silly about all this is that when using the website to tweet you by definition do <i>not</i> need a URL shortener. You are not allowed to type more than 140 characters in the input field, so your message is necessarily already under 140 chars, so the shortening does <i>nothing</i>. I find this particularly frustrating since I have a message with a perfectly legible URL, hit send, and all of a sudden its a short URL that now one know where it goes anymore. If it auto shortened your URL as you pasted it in (as opposed to after hitting reply/send), then it would at least allow to type more, but as it is, the auto shortening serves no user-purpose.
bit.ly has one drawback: a proliferation of bit.ly URLs pointing to the same URL, because every user can get an individual abbreviation.<p>That makes reverse lookups infeasible (get tinyurl for url, search twitter for tinyurl - see who links to you). At least with tinyurl most abbreviations were the same.
> Breaking news from the red-hot world of URL shorteners.<p>I don't know if the goal of the author was that but after the first sentence of the article I was laughing like a mad :)