My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that tinyurl looks through their links for ebay/amazon urls that don't have affiliate link id's, and if not, they add their own to them. Pretty ingenious, as it monetizes transparently.
This is a great idea. Does anyone know if any of the existing URL shortners do it? You could then differentiate your service by having a very minimal ui, since you'd no longer be dependant on advertising for revenue.
I'm don't think there's any room for differentiation left in the tinyurl space.
There are literally hundreds of such services and some of them work without an UI altogether (see the firefox addon for http://is.gd).
Maybe, just maybe, you could set yourself apart by integrating tinypic, tinyurl and tinyvideo(?) or such into a neat package, and adding some whipcream features on top - but honestly, I'm very doubtful that there's any money in this.
Well, people said that before we launched tinyarro.ws and I think that was different enough to catch people's attention. There are probably a few ideas out there left to try.
I don't think that's a very warming idea. Feels kind of shady to me. Another step further and I'm expecting the service to remove other people's affiliate IDs and adding their own.
On other fronts, we offer one approach on tinyurl "differentiation" via http://tinyarro.ws (super-small unicode URLs). For minimalists, we did http://ri.ms.
Not an overabundance of room nowadays to differentiate. But with TinyArrows, the concept is interesting enough to people that it has taken on a life of its own on Twitter, and we actually get a little traffic out of it to our other sites. But it's not enough traffic that I could recommend people spend much time on their own URL shrinkers (unless they're just bored and have a really compelling idea).
I suggest using the services as a feeder for leads for your other products-- I personally see the affiliate thing as a bit shady. The only cool place to do it is in those awful spam emails that spammers overload the URL shrinkers with to hide their target site-- you could steal their revenue. But then you're making money off of spam...
Thinking of packaging up a script I'm using for http://urli.ca and releasing it. Extremely simple php app that anyone could code in under an hour. Anyone interested?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] threadMade a TinyURL of http://www.amazon.com/10-Inch-Netbook-Processor-Storage-Blue... and the link didn't change.
I'm don't think there's any room for differentiation left in the tinyurl space. There are literally hundreds of such services and some of them work without an UI altogether (see the firefox addon for http://is.gd).
Maybe, just maybe, you could set yourself apart by integrating tinypic, tinyurl and tinyvideo(?) or such into a neat package, and adding some whipcream features on top - but honestly, I'm very doubtful that there's any money in this.
On other fronts, we offer one approach on tinyurl "differentiation" via http://tinyarro.ws (super-small unicode URLs). For minimalists, we did http://ri.ms.
Not an overabundance of room nowadays to differentiate. But with TinyArrows, the concept is interesting enough to people that it has taken on a life of its own on Twitter, and we actually get a little traffic out of it to our other sites. But it's not enough traffic that I could recommend people spend much time on their own URL shrinkers (unless they're just bored and have a really compelling idea).
I suggest using the services as a feeder for leads for your other products-- I personally see the affiliate thing as a bit shady. The only cool place to do it is in those awful spam emails that spammers overload the URL shrinkers with to hide their target site-- you could steal their revenue. But then you're making money off of spam...
Either Firefox doesn't recognise it as a valid address, or my DNS doesn't?
Assign the unused go:// protocol to redirect to your own url shortener and create a firefox extension to handle that for the user.
go:google
go:ABCDEFGHIJ
go:QX9RHG03WA
There you have it, the shortest shortener ever.