Staying in Business and Trusting the Cloud
This morning I noticed that many of the traditional news feeds were talking about this:
and I have to agree that the thread of profit for a URL shortening service is not clear to me. While it's possible to track the creator, the target URL, and the hits on that 'shortened' URL, it's not clear why this would be a service that others would want to pay for.
Sure, I can see why a web-based service might want to have URL shortening in it's arsenal of features, but to pay someone else to do this, is a little odd to me. Of course, if they had been able to get a dominate API or enough mindshare - like Google, then I can see it being more of a 'defacto standard'. But that didn't happen because the barrier to entry is so low.
But the cost of maintenance is high: you've got to have a ton of bandwidth and a ton of storage if you're going to be any good at this. So the costs are there, but that's about it for the barrier to entry. The rest is a little script and you can hack that together in a short time.
No, this is Natural Selection at it's best - the weak are weeded out and the strong survive. We don't need a ton of URL shortening tools. Just a few - at most. But for all those people that have these URLs in their blog posts and search pages, it's going to be a mess clearing out the bad data and replacing it with good. It would be nice for someone to take the database and the domain and keep this going - but that's the point of the notice. No one wants to pay for it, and that's why it's shutting down.
Which, of course, is why I don't use URL shortening save when an app does it for me - Twitteriffic.