TinyURL Growing

from the so-damn-useful dept

Sometimes, an idea just clicks. These days, most people already know about TinyURL, the site that will take any long URL and make it shorter - so that it's easier to send to other people. They weren't the first such service (makeashorterlink.com was popular first) and they certainly weren't the last (there are dozens of similar services), but for some reason, TinyURL is the one that has really caught on. Wired News has tracked down the guy who created the service and found out he did so to make it easier to pass around unicycling related webpages. He's also trying to turn TinyURL into a business, by offering a premium service. That might be tough with all the competition. Still, the most interesting part are the stats: TinyURL receives 80 million page views a month. It has unique IDs for 2.3 million URLs, with 8,400 new TinyURLs created each day. He even says that a few companies have offered to buy TinyURL, but apparently he's turned them down. Of course, one of the late night, silly, pointless ideas we had at Techdirt was to jokingly create HugeURL.com that would take a URL and make it much longer. Of course, we gave up on that idea pretty quickly - but others didn't, and now HugeURL.com exists (though, I have no idea who's behind it).

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