Cybernetics

As I got up this morning. Easter sunday 2010.

I had a great idea.
I was going to build a url shortener website, and add statistic tools to it.

This seemed to be a dead easy thing to do, and I am sure, with my technical skill and knowledge to build a better one than all those which exist online.

What is the point in a url shortener site:
1) shorten urls to make them easier to “tweat” or text
2) log information from the users who visit your site: location, browser, page on which they clicked
3) many other things like this link suggests:
http://www.friedbeef.com/top-5-url-shorteners-and-how-they-help-you/

I will start by choosing a cool web name:

such as:
sho.rt, qui.ck or smi.le

But as I surfed the web, and looked at what was already out there, I discovered those which already existed:

These are the ones I found:

The leader:
http://bit.ly
http://j.mp

Google’s:

http://goo.gl

Other:
http://is.gd
http://sn.im

http://go.to/
http://start.at/
http://i.am/

But this one alerted me that it was maybe not such a good idea after all, since it can lead to too many spammers using the tool:

http://tr.im

I still think it could be an fun to create something better, and the competition doesn’t seem that high.
But it may just take a bit more time.
I also think this could be the perfect project to test out my shinny new dedicated server.

I will still keep the idea at the back of my mind, but maybe not for this weekend.

Anyway, another interresting aspect of these websites is the use of exotic top level domain (tld) of  countries to create interresting urls such as:

.ly for lybia
.gl for greenland
.im for mariana islands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

The last interresting point will have been the actually domain name hunting:

I was pretty surprised to see how many tld ovh.com now had on offer.

I still have to found out how to get the .ck for qui.ck for the cook islands.

I was sorry to found out that the .le did not existe yet, since this could have been used for very interrestin names.

I will definitly keep this in mind if I ever get to set up an interresting website on day.