As if we needed yet another URL shortening service, TweetMeme is today debuting ReTwt.me in an effort to make that particular saturated field even more so. And it’s not like it does anything special in comparison with the plethora of similar services out there.
It shrinks longer links in order to make them more tweetable (and retweetable), it gives you some options to share links from its main website, throws in some analytics so you can see just how few people actually click those links you’re spreading and comes with an API.
The only slight advantage it could have over competitors like TinyURL and bit.ly is a tight integration with the TweetMeme service / button, but they won’t be exploiting that connection and keep on supporting the URL shortening services as they were before (which is obviously the right thing to do).
TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead asks the appropriate question in the e-mail announcing ReTwt.me: why did they build this? The answer:
Firstly and foremost ‘reliability’, we pride ourselves at TweetMeme for the continued up-time and scalability of the service. Going forward we wanted to have ‘platform security’ that we always had a fallback position if any of the current shorteners either closed down or had any outages.
I have my doubts about ReTwt.me being more serious about uptime and scalability than some of the other services, like bit.ly (a venture-capital funded startup to which URL shortening and analytics is core business) and Digg (which I’m sure has a lot more load on its servers than TweetMeme currently has), but having a fall-back option I guess makes sense.
Nevertheless, I can’t imagine why any end user would want to switch to ReTwt.me for URL shortening purposes. Halstead bets on the simpleness of the service, but I don’t know how anyone could make the existing URL shortening services more basic than they already are.
But please do judge for yourself (and don’t forget to retwt this story).
It’s not even that much shorter than bit.ly. 2 more letters! deal breaker
[REMOVED IRRELEVANT LINK]
haha, damn!
“So you like circular references, huh?”. They caught me
Too many URL shorteners out there, its very interesting to see how retwt.me tracks shortened URLs on Twitter.
Undoubtedly ReTwt.me will be a good competitor for other existing ones..We need to wait and see to what extent ReTwt.me is different to us!!
Nice clean interface but bit.ly is the Nr1. on Twitter. This is also a step agains retweet (RT.nu)
One main difference is that the analytics side of retwt.me is public and everyone can view the short URL performance.
Bit.ly does that too.
What’s the idea behind this URL shortener craze? There’s no business in it anyway, so why is it so extensively covered on TC?
I agree that there is too many shortner services out there, but would it be more likely that if the service is tied to another product that they are less likely to fail.
Interesting that if you want to comment, Techcrunch uses Bitly to shorten URL >>>
http://easyurl.net/easyframe
BREAKING: easyURL.net adds useless “easyFrame” to redirects.
Feeling left out of the web 2.0 “URL Shortener” hysteria, we’ve added an mostly useless “easyFrame”â„¢ to the easyURL.net redirect service. The culmination of nearly two night’s worth of programming in front of the TV, and nearing 100 lines of PHP code, the easyFrameâ„¢ enables people to further perpetuate it’s marginal functionality via other social networking sites with a single click. Users may also “vote” on whether they actually like or dislike the subject URL being shortened.
Perhaps the single actual useful function of the easyFrameâ„¢ is that you can also report spam URLs directly to us, with one click, which we will then nuke with extreme prejudice.
We are also happy to report that our new easyFrameâ„¢ has enticed a VC bidding war and easyURL has closed a $30 Million dollar A series funding round with a pre-money valuation more than 100X that of easyDNS itself. We are now planning on spinning off easyURL.net in an October IPO.
I wrote that this is what Retweet should have done with their service apart from just copy Tweetmeme. http://crenk.co...eetmeme-killer/
http://rt.nu/
I am actually surprized, this new URL shortener actually reminds me of Retweet much more than TweetMeme… Not sure this is what they wanted!
OH GOD SOMEBODY MAKE IT STOP!
Dear twitter
please end this hysteria. URL shortening is evil and is going to end Western Civilization. It encourages unsafe user behavior and allows easier phishing attacks.
please get URL data out of the 140 character message and into a separate metadata field.
this is all.
that wont work for the SMS service (but maybe then – use a shortned URL in that case)
This is bullshit and we both know it. A responsible Twitter would just forward the domain part of the URL to a sms-using twitiot.
People should use whatever shortener they like, but ideally one they run themselves *at the same domain* (for performance reasons) and then advertise that short link in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD using rel=shortlink.
Sam
Was twtme.me already taken? retwt.me seems like a url shortner for their competitor retweet.com
It is available and it is much better – hope they are reading this.
Meh. Bit.ly is the king of the market and probably will stay so for long time..Unless someone pays twitter gazillion dollars to remove Bit.ly as default url shortener.
Ahh!
“a URL” not “an URL”, unless you say it like “Earl.”
+10
+1.5
I like their interface quite a bit. Very cool looking. Shouldn’t be hard to pick up steam considering how popular TweetMeme is.
STOOOOOOOP with the URL shortners, in this case the url isnt even short!
tweetmeme fail!
I believe competitions brings out best things for end users…you never know what new features they can bring in…anyways i use http://www.Aafter.com which is quite simple to for the job of shortening url.