Honey, I Shrunk the URL

Kevin Gilbertson has an inordinate love of unicycling. He has been riding unicycles since he was a kid, competes regularly in races and even goes off-roading. But when he tried to spread the joy among other Internet users, he was stymied by long, unwieldy URLs.

By Katie Dean

http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62637,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

So the 24-year-old Web developer from Blaine, Minnesota, launched TinyURL.com in January 2002, a free site that converts huge strings of characters into more manageable snippets. The site’s popularity has skyrocketed as Web savants use it to pass around Web-generated maps, news clippings and newsgroup postings.

The site now receives about 80 million pageviews a month. It generates, on average, 8,400 truncated URLs a day. Gilbertson says other companies have approached him about buying his site.

"It’s a good, simple idea and it’s useful for a lot of people," he said.

The idea is indeed simple. Plug in a long URL, say the MapQuest page for the White House — http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?
country=US&countryid=250&addtohistory=&address=
1600+pennsylvania+ave&city=washington&state=
DC&zipcode=&submit=Get+Map — and you get something short and sweet — http://tinyurl.com/37ggx.

Gilbertson said he created the site because he wanted to convert postings on unicycling newsgroups into Web pages, since fewer people know their way around newsgroups than the Web. Currently, the underlying database of the site has unique IDs for 2.3 million URLs. Google’s AdSense links on the site bring in money that pays for the operating costs and "a little extra," he said.

Gilbertson is working to expand the site into a business. The URL-shortening service will remain free, but he’s developing customization services that would have a fee attached. Businesses might use the service to track information and gather statistics. He declined to be more specific.

Gilbertson, or Gilby as his pals call him, has been a unicycle nut since he was 8 years old. Both his parents and his brother — a magician — unicycle for fun and in parades.

Gilbertson also competes regularly in races and freestyle riding. Next week he will ride with 100 others in a competition on the Slickrock trail in Moab, Utah. Earlier this month, he competed in the TOque Games in Toronto, where unicyclists compete in tricks like hopping on cars, riding over boxes and racing on rough terrain.

He also plays field hockey and basketball — atop a unicycle — with the Twin Cities Unicycle Club. He’s developed several unicycling websites and makes unicycle T-shirts.

"Right now my main work is developing TinyURL.com," he said.

Programmer Thomas Thurman is active with several Internet communities and uses TinyURL regularly to direct others to interesting sites. Since the groups limit the number of characters per line to 80 or fewer, TinyURL comes in handy, Thurman said. He also likes it better than a similar site, MakeAShorterLink, because TinyURL uses the minimum possible length, and the name of the site is shorter too.

Another URL-truncation service is Shorl.com.

Thurman also wrote about TinyURL "whacking" in his weblog. He discovered users can surf around the URLs TinyURL has created for other sites by plugging in a few random numbers and letters. Tooling around led to sites that featured the world’s biggest seed and a story on how to optimize Windows XP.

TinyURL can’t stop another lingering problem with URLs, however. Link rot, that maddening problem of expired links, still remains.

"TinyURL will still redirect that user to the original URL but whatever error they get, they will get the same error," Gilbertson said. "We don’t cache pages, we just do the redirection."