Twitterbrite TR1
Monday, March 1st, 2010Twitterbrite TR1 (Temporary release 1) is out now, however please read the notes as this is very much a beta version.
Archive for the ‘URL shortners’ Category
Happy new year, and a free gift
Friday, January 1st, 2010Firstly Happy new year!
Sorry it’s been a while, however I’ve been busy writing code for a new project called TwitterBrite. It’s a twitter client for windows, that similar to applications like hootsuite allows users to post RSS feeds to twitter and search it for useful people to follow, however it solves one of the major drawbacks I see with hootsuite, that of security.
Hootsuite is a purely web based application, if something goes wrong with it (for example it starts re-posting old RSS entries, or spamming your followers with direct messages) their is nothing you can do about it, sure you can login and terminate your account, but as happened to a couple of services last year, what if you can’t login?
Control is I believe one of the biggest stumbling blocks for company wishing to access the power of social media, the what if something goes wrong argument.
Anyway as part of this project, I’ve been working on a .net based DLL that provides an interface for the Bit.ly URL shorten (which TwitterBrite will use) you can download it and a, hopefully useful, read me file from us here.
P.S. The DLL isn’t open source, however if you want the code, drop me a line. If you’re a business and want to keep it close source, I’m willing to sell it, providing I get a free life time upgrade/resell permissions for my products, if you’re interested in making it open source, that fine as well, just as long as you can show your going to move the interface forward.
First test for 301works as Cli.gs goes off line
Monday, October 5th, 2009The much hyped URL Shortening archiving service 301works will have their first big test soon. As the shortening service Cli.gs goes off line (assuming it’s not another Tr.im). Their blog has just announced that “On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics”.
The service (301works) is supposed to archive the links of URL shortening services in order to prevent a whole host of links going down when (as if) as service shuts up shop, and was started jointly by a group of URL shortners in order to give a degree of consumer confidence in their services.
However the organisations web site still has “Coming Soon” image on its web site, and some in the industry are worried that it may not be ready in time to prevent Cli.gs links vanishing.
All this has me thinking, that will I currently use bit.ly for everything, I may install a service like phul that runs on my servers and so will be running for as long as I am, if you know of any PHP, Python or Ruby scripts that do the job, let me know in the comments section.
Tr.im, “It’s all Bit.ly and Twitters fault!”
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Tr.im the URL shorting service from company Nambu has had a turbulent few week’s first it was put up for sale, then shut down, then back-up again. Now it’s being released as open source and becoming Community Owned, and it’s all twitters and bit.ly’s fault!
In a press release they state.
“We would like to set the record straight. Last Monday, August 10, 2009, bit.ly offered $10,000 for the tr.im domain name and everything associated with it. They used this “offer” to inject themselves into the conversation, and generate attention for their shallow initiative to address link-rot. It was transparent, and so I rejected it.
That initiative, 301works.org, is little more than a bit.ly public relations stunt, which is why we have not joined it. It has little substance, claiming to address link-rot while it does nothing of the kind. If a URL shortener decides to close, only the donation of the domain name and the data can address the existing links. For any high-volume URL shortener, like tr.im, it is unlikely a commercial entity would do that given the offers we have seen come in this past week to immediately hijack all tr.im URLs.”
However bit.ly aren’t going to take this lying down! In an interview with readwriteweb they said
I think this is great, it means there will be a future for tr.im and having more services out there is a really good thing. [Tr.im's Eric Woodward] is short on the facts though and the facts are if you look at the clicks and encodes on bit.ly in a day, 15 million yesterday for example, 60% of them are from Twitter, less than 10% come from twitter.com. It’s about product iteration and adding features. [That's why Bit.ly is so popular, Borthwick argues.] Eric made a choice and bit.ly has made a different choice”
It appears to me to be sour grapes from tr.im, while I of course applauded the decision to make tr.im open source and community owned, blaming bit.ly and twitter for your loss of market share is a bit extreme to say the least!