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.

We’ve been using it internally for our Twitter accounts and it’s worked fantastic. Of course, a few other developers had the exact same thought, so I doubt that this thing will really take off. As was discussed in that first post, the easily replicable nature of the project makes it the type of thing that probably isn’t worth trying to monetize, but still worth making available to anyone who wants it. Hopefully at least a few other businesses/developers will find it as useful as we have.

Here are a few screenshots of the admin section for anyone curious about what it looks like once installed.

The main page, where you can create a new link and see a summary of existing links:

The stats available for each link:

If anyone has the time to take it for a spin I’d love to hear your feedback – either in the comments below or via email.

Background

When I started using Twitter, one of the first things that piqued my interest was URL shorteners. Not only does it make no sense why Twitter doesn’t officially have their own URL shortening service (although bit.ly is sort of official now), but it really made no sense to me why everyone used either bit.ly or tinyurl.com instead of creating their own. A URL shortener is uber simple to program and can offer you a ton of value.  So I picked up the domain “ips.me” with the intent of using it as my own URL shortener.

Then I realized that this simple script could be valuable to a lot of people and a lot of businesses.   After some thought, I decided to turn this into an open source project and release it for everyone to use.  Yesterday I finally got around to putting the site up at http://z.ips.me.  Although the first version isn’t available for download yet, I’ve begun testing it on my Twitter account.

Benefits

The benefits of my own URL shortener are pretty obvious to me:

• I can name the URL whatever I want.  I can get http://z.ips.me/Adam to point to this blog instead of http://tinyurl.com/den93j
• I control how long the redirect is in place.  If I want to change it or remove it, I can.  Or I can leave it up forever.
• I control whether it’s a permanent 301 redirect (search engine friendly) or a temporary 302 redirect.
• I get the data and they don’t.  I know when someone clicked a link, what site they clicked it on, what browser they’re using, and more.  I can aggregate all of this data and use it to my advantage.
• I’m branding MY site and not another third party.  If someone says “hey what’s z.ips.me” and visits it, I get the traffic.

Who Will Use it?

Personally, I think every business that’s on Twitter should be using their own URL shortener.  If their domain is too long, they can spend $10/year and buy a new one like I did.

The perfect example is a company like Dell.  On their Twitter page they use a combination of ow.ly and bit.ly.  They recently reported that they’ve generated over $3 million in revenue from their links on Twitter.  Imagine if those links came from t.dell.com.  They’d have all the data.  They’d control where a link goes when a sale ends.  They’d brand their own domain.

I also think that web marketing companies and SEO companies would all love to have this kind of control for their clients.

Feedback!!!

Right now the site currently says that we’re in a private Beta. You can sign up to receive an email once the service is available for download. My question to you is – how useful do you think this service is?  For site owners?  Businesses?  Web marketers/SEOs? I’m debating how long I should test it before developing it to the point that it can be released it to the public (there needs to be an install script and a better admin interface, along with instructions).

In terms of monetization, there is some revenue potential in domain/hosting referral commissions, and also the potential to charge for installs, but most likely this is more along the lines of Music-Alerts – a fun project that doesn’t really make any money.

Twitter is the ultimate instant form of communication.  With that 140 character limit, you sacrifice a lot of things.  It’s meant for quick statements and links to more information.  A blog might not be as instant, but it has infinitely more potential as a content medium.  And blogging as most of us think of it (timely, personal, unfiltered) has some great advantages, but lacks the thoroughness and checks/balances that a newspaper or magazine article goes through prior to being published.  And the best magazine article you’ve ever read hasn’t had even close to the research and editing put into it that most non-fiction books have.

I am on Twitter, I read a lot of blogs, I read several magazines each month, and I’m always reading a few books.   Each medium does things that the others cannot, and therefore it seems unlikely that any one medium will replace one of the other ones any time soon.

I just broke down and signed up for Twitter, but not for the reasons most people do.  I found the Twitter search EXTREMELY helpful today when my Thunderbird + Google Apps Gmail IMAP  email set up started giving me all sorts of errors.  No one had likely blogged about it yet (plus there’s no real good way to instantly search blogs), but in searching Twitter I found out that all sorts of people were having the same issues as me.  It was very re-assuring and time saving.  I didn’t see any posts on the Gmail Google Groups so I may have thought it was me and wasted time messing around with my configuration.  Instead, I’ll just wait until it’s resolved and use Gmail online in the meantime.

This was when I had my “ah-ha” Twitter moment.  I don’t really care about keeping up with my friends all day long, but I do care about using it for breaking news, especially down-time for the web services I consume on a regular basis.  There’s just no other way to search in real-time that compares.  And if I’m using Twitter, my tweets will hopefully help others in the same way that their tweets helped me today.

My largest commented blog post was when PayPal subscriptions went down, mostly because I was the first to jump on the story and other people found it through search.  Imagine if Twitter was more popular back then (I say “back then” as if 2007 is a long time ago).  The information would have spread much faster via Twitter, and more people would have been able to communicate on the issue faster and more effectively.

So that’s why I signed up.

My URL is http://twitter.com/YEAdamMcFarland

I plan on “tweeting” a lot of the misc stuff that I don’t bother posting on this blog but still might be helpful to people.  I’m also going to add the feed to my sidebar so you can just skim the updates as you read if you don’t want to stalk my every move all day long.