Comments on: Announcing Z.ips.ME – Your Very Own URL Shortener

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:39:52 +0000

Thanks Kevin. It’s live now so take it for a spin and let me know what you think

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:54:38 +0000

cool.. this is nice idea to have own url shortner.. why to depend on other services…

By: Z.ips.ME Launched! | Adam McFarland

Z.ips.ME Launched! | Adam McFarland — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:02:18 +0000

[...] After URL shortening service tr.im closed and then re-opened this week due to the public backlash, I thought it would be a good time to release Z.ips.ME, the URL shortener for PHP & MySQL that I started working on a few months back. [...]

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:40:29 +0000

Hmm. That’s a pretty interesting idea. Never really explored ways to use the Mechanical Turk for a web app…I’ll add it to my list!

By: nethy

nethy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:13:37 +0000

Adam,

I’m making a request for your next app: Something powered by the Mechanical Turk.

I just think it’d be a great place for creativity.

By: nethy

nethy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:16:36 +0000

You’re right of course.

Anyway, like I think you’ve said before: The web app /web services world is bloated. Lots of apps. Not so many paying users.

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:18:35 +0000

Thanks for the insight Ted. I may drop you an email to pick your brain a bit prior to releasing it to the world.

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:16:58 +0000

Good question Dale. URL shortening really only has one purpose in my opinion – Twitter. You’re limited to 140 characters so you want your URLs as small as possible.

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:15:25 +0000

Great observations. I’m not sure about whether or not there is anything else out there. I thought there would be, but I didn’t really find much of anything out there when I searched. Plus I kind of don’t care. It’s not like I’m trying to build a business out of it. It’ll be a simple script that works. If other people build upon it or release better versions, than so be it. Like you said, it’s “problematically easy to copy” which is why I don’t give it much consideration as a hosted web service. If you were trying to build this as a business, you’d definitely go that way, although my thought is you’d get crushed by someone with more man power pretty quickly. My partners and I talked about it, but I really just wanted it to be a small side project. I didn’t want to worry about the technical issues with scaling a site that redirects thousands upon thousands of links.

By: Ted

Ted — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:11:58 +0000

With your programming knowledge, this is a great idea. I used to run a similar service with a simple open source script.

But beware, In my naivety I let it to run itself and it was abused by spammers, and blacklisted and irrelevant.

If I was to do this again I would take the time to code it from scratch with some inbuilt safeguards.