You may have noticed over the last few weeks that TechCrunch links on Twitter have had a nifty custom URL, with links looking like tcrn.ch/1A’ instead of more generic codes from TinyURL or Bit.ly. This was due in no small part to the handiwork of our crack team of developers, but it was made possible by a new service launching today called Awe.sm.
There are countless URL shortening services available on the web, and they’re probably only going to become even more popular as Twitter continues to catch on with mainstream audiences. But these services come with downsides, like obscuring where a link is pointing to (which makes them a godsend for spammers). Awe.sm is looking to offer publishers an alternative to these generic services, while also offering a powerful analytics engine that offers much more insight as to how their content gets distributed across the web.
Every time we publish a post on TechCrunch, Awe.sm generates a handful of links specific to the service it originates on. For example, the shortcode link at the bottom of this post is different from the link that we send out on Twitter through the TechCrunch account. Awe.sm then tracks these links, analyzing how they’re spread and storing meta data on each. Even better, the links awe.sm creates are compatible with Google Analytics, so you don’t have to learn how to navigate yet another dashboard.
This means that we can get a feel for how our links are spreading throughout each service, quantifying just how effective each one is and adjusting accordingly. And for some services, including Twitterfeed, AddtoAny, and TweetFace, Awe.sm can work in tandem with the service to gather even more data. Readers benefit too – spammers don’t have access to tcrn.ch, so all URLs pointing to that domain can be considered trustworthy.
Awe.sm is available beginning today for $99/year, which includes 10,000 URL creations per month (more than most people will ever need) and the option to export your data at any time if you want to stop using Awe.sm. The company’s flagship product is this custom URL shortening service, but it is also going to provide publishers with more tools that will help distribute content across a variety of services to maximize their audiences. The service is also slowly opening up an API to developers, who can build their own applications off the platform.
Awe.sm idea and service. I like it. BTW, TechCrunch has lifetime free subscription to Awe.sm?
Even if they’re comping TechCrunch for the publicity $99/year doesn’t make my journalistic integrity alarm go off.
Let’s just worry about the big stuff.
Well said. Who the hell would cheat for 100 bucks?
Al Gore would.
Any chance on some free codes for TC readers?
Do they show you how to set it up on your blog like here on techcrunch? Or is that something you’ll have to figure out on your own? It’s cool how the short URLs are automatically added to every tech crunch post.
Hey Isaac, we’re working to partner with tools like the AddToAny share widget so that adding awe.sm to your site is as simple as possible.
For more info on the full offering, check out the official announcement on our blog.
Hey Isaac,
We did a custom installation at TC. But it’s a pretty simple plugin: tie into WordPress hooks, use cURL to grab awesm links via their API, and then store the links as post meta.
The ‘try me now’ link on the awe.sm site doesn’t give a personalized short URL such as the tcrn.ch example. It merely says ‘awe.sm/–’
Does one have to pay to have the URL reflect the site? Even just to test it…correct?
That’s correct, custom domains are only available to paying customers. The demo is primarily for publishers to try out our Google Analytics integration.
It’d be impossible for them to allow you to try it out with a custom domain. You’d have to buy the domain and point it to them, just to ‘try it’.
Less about paying, more about practibility.
Yawn, you can get this service free of charge from many URL shorteners.
if Twitter were smart they would filter all URL postings through their own shortener.
Everyone knows it is on the table. And everyone also knows that Twitter is in talks with many URL shorteners.
We also know that if you were to prioritize the obstacles that twitter is facing, URL shortening is not at the top of that list.
They have a lot of smart people working for them, I am sure they will make the right choice.
Anyways, this is just the beginning of URL shortening. The innovation is fun to watch.
If you’re interested in trying awe.sm for your AddToAny Share/Save widget, feel free to get in touch: http://www.addt...ny.com/contact/
we have been providing simple shortening using your own domain for the last number of months at http://hover.com.
it surprises me that people, especially geeks, are not cluing in faster to the fact that you should be using your own domain name for short urls, not unbranded services, especially those without semantics.
Maybe its your fault, ok? You should shut up and punch your marketing dept in the face, ok? Its not consumers job to find you, ok? These dudes obviously found the secret to getting explosure. What an embarrassing display. Such is the word of Sanjay.
sanjay, I am not (at all) talking about people cluing in to hover. I am talking solely about people using their own domains for url shortening. ok?
This issue wouldn’t be an issue at all if Twitter would just allow for hyperlinks in tweets
Congrats guys! Great service, great people. Kudos!
Damn, I have been working on a service just like this, beat me too… I guess I’ll still release it.
I think they should promote this by offering a special deal: free to the first commenter who suggests they offer a special deal.
any similar free services for personal/non ad-supported sites available?
Do you want some cake to go with that? Geez. Don’t be a free loader! Such is the word of Sanjay.
oh right, running a not-for-$, personal site, with no ads and in turn looking for/asking about a zero cost solution…that is freeloading.
classy.
I always had the same question when I would see the short URL’s as to how to know which domain they are associated with.
In these times when just having a subscriber base is not good enough its a very revenue model for Awe.sm. Good job
CRAZY!! $99 a year for shortcut service… WOW!!
with what?? more options to analyze my clicks??
I can not even imagine this being a valuable asset for Ashton Kutcher what kind of value can he get with lets say having hundreds of short links and being able to get more analytics data from it?
ZERO VALUE !
You are right. Who in their right mind would bother with tracking incoming traffic. As long as they get traffic, they should be grateful. Just spread your efforts on any site, even if you only get one referer per month from them. You don’t need to optimize, just hire a couple of hundred people to spam the net with links, in the hope that some of those sites give a higher return.¨
Spend a few hours integrating support for the new social site. Who wants to bother with tracking the incoming links to see if it matters. We are developers with unlimited time, that can do this for fun.
The tcrn.ch link does not render the page on my Blackberry Bold. It opens the page and then displays a blank page with the TC header. I have no problems with bit.ly and other short URLs. Any others have this problem?
Well, that’s the risk of going with the cutting edge of url shortening, right? You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, after all.
Don’t worry, once they get the bugs worked out you will be forced to behold a URL shortener with the power and features you’ve been looking for. Better have your sunglasses ready.
Own domain is good, but if analytics means relying on Google Analytics, I have a feeling they won’t be tracking stuff as accurately as it seems. Looking forward to trying it more directly to test, when I can get access.
Hey Danny, the Google Analytics integration is a feature we’ve found that publishers who have analytics fatigue (e.g. having to check GA, Feedburner, WP stats, Lijit, etc, etc) really love. It is also essential to connecting the upstream behavior to downstream conversions as our friends at Topspin blogged about yesterday — using awe.sm they were able to establish that 20% of sales on the latest Jimmy Eat World album were being driven through Twitter.
However, it is by no means the extent of our stat tracking. Just like bit.ly, cli.gs, tri.m and anyone else who does redirect tracking, we capture the full clickstream data, which users can access either through our stats UI or our APIs.
Will get you a test account ASAP so you can see for yourself
Congrats Jonathan, glad to see you cruising.
The other challenge with having your own domain remains, of course, the fact that the very idea of shortening means you need a short root domain — and those are hard to get for US-based domains. You can go to other countries, and so far, there doesn’t seem to be an issue with say Mongolia deciding to change the rules. But it’s still an extra expense and hassle for many, I’d say, especially if you’re big on trying to maintain your brand.
As I mention in our ‘official’ announcement, the custom URL shortener was more a reaction to demand than anything else. The original use-case for which we built the feature was actually redirect tracking *beyond* Twitter. Since our goal is to help content publishers with campaign tracking across all their outbound channels (especially Social Media), we wanted to offer them the best way to do redirect tracking on services other than Twitter where brevity doesn’t trump branding.
So, the idea was to offer publishers the ability to use awe.sm on Twitter and something like links.publisher.com everywhere else. But the interest in a standalone white-label URL shortener was strong enough that we decided to make that an offering as well. FWIW, domai.nr is a really cool tool to find non-conventional domains (and it’s how we found awe.sm
).
I thought domai.nr was pretty cool. Took me a bit to figure out that some of what it listed were taken (wish they’d flag those in red), and in a few cases those available turned out not to be. But yep, got some great ideas from the tool.
Thanks! Regarding status display, the idea is similar to read/unread status in an email client. The exception case—what should merit attention—is unread messages. In Domainr’s case, it’s an available domain.
it is VERY rare that the extra 2-5 characters matters in a tweet. not never, but very rarely.
and when it does, it is always a great mental exercise to try and be more concise!
i don’t want some random shortener … not quite there yet
Any idea is if the shortened URLs are 301 redirects so google indexes them properly?
Sounds like a great tool and $99 for any decent publisher is pocket change.
Next steps: release an addon/bookmarlet that lets me shorten the URL using my custom domain from any page that Im on. Or, is that against their ToS since Im creating a short URL to another domain? I would assume so since that defeats the whole purpose of “trusting” the domain.
Yes, all awe.sm (and awe.sm-powered) URLs are 301s. So all search engine juice passes to the destination page.
We do already have bookmarklets that allow you to shorten the page you’re on and post it directly to Twitter using any awe.sm-powered domain you control. We don’t restrict the links you create through a custom domain to any set of original domains. It is up to you as the domain owner to build and protect the brand value of your short domain.
Yes, when I checked, out-of-the box free links that anyone can get use 301 redirection.
This is really a feature that other URL shorteners were missing. Well done! All you need is a short and brandable domain now: http://tr.im/j9K3
Anyone else wondering why goog hasn’t put together a URL shortner service?
The Case For:
* Gmaps/gdocs/gsite/youtube urls are absurdly long (and often absurdly absurd). Consume the goog shortener service.
* Inserting yourself between a click and a target is a nice way of getting additional analytics for sites that haven’t been peppered with adsense/g-analytics/gears etc.
* How does a url shortening service skew pagerank? Fix the skew in pagerank.
What’s the downside?
CG
http://greacen.com
http://twitter.com/greacen
The battle for characters continues.
Well, if anyone interested in shortest domain name: C.GG – let me know: g@c.gg
Gleb
great domain. I am almost done with mine shortening-thingy @ cut.tw (tw for TWitter users of course
should be online later this week (oh well like anyone is awaiting, but anyways programming this kind of stuff is fun!)
@cut.TW
Hmmm shortened URL, probably should have bought one back in the 90’s
sa.ndy.net
Yea..isn’t it called tiny url? thesnowballfactory.com may already be worth 50 0million dollars. No recession in silicon valley. http://iamned.com/blog/ stock market keeps going higher
this is bogus…there is no invite code and there is no way to test it with out none. So what is the point of this post?
You can test it out without an invite code at http://create.awe.sm/demo/. And if you have Google Analytics running on the page you shorten, you will see the stats show up there.
If you can’t write your own URL shortener you probably shouldn’t be developing web applications. It’s an utterly trivial piece of code.
Does anyone know where I could find an free, open source, self-hosted url shortner application (or WordPress Plugin). I’d be surprised if there someone hasn’t created a one click app to make your local domain shorten the path (i.e. transform ‘http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a-powerful-custom-url-shortener-for-your-own-domain/’ into ‘http://techcrunch.com/9exd8′). It would offer better SEO value as well as providing a descriptive embedded domain.
http://wordpres...ort-url-plugin/ for WP and http://www.harl...ipts/short-url/ is a self-hosted PHP script
Have you had any experience using either of these scripts?
*not ‘local’
$99/year is expensive for a url shortening service. It doesn’t take more than a decent hosting service and a domain name to create one using http://get-shorty.com/
blahhh… linkbee and linkbucks are still the best. not sure why there is never a mention of the two, they rock with their earning options
…I built something like this months back, maybe I should use techcrunch to launch my shit >:(
Congrats Jonathan – glad to see you launched!
Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for blogging. I will definitely be subscribing to your posts. Keep up the good posts
What would you consider that the value of a new shortening domain would be in 2 yrs? 5 yrs? Some of these country codes charge in excess of $150 for a domain, add $99 for this. How does one get $250 back with just doing 301’s???
R
I had a little ‘microrally’ the other night to see what Bit.ly could do and I came up with some interesting results. Wrote a post on it: http://bit.ly/jmx0E Cheers!
URLCatch.com has been providing this service (of BYOD) since it was released. It also allows you to post to Twitter or Facebook from the URLCatch AOL bot – which is pretty handy.
If you do create your own short links don’t forget to advertise them to clients with the rel=shortlink standard!
Sam