Get the Flip Away – You

Forget del.icio.us and Digg, put Facebook and MySpace aside – the real big hitter of the new social web is TinyURL and the various clones floating around the web.

Thanks to the massive success of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and even Twit Army (running Laconica – short URL services are in high demand.

I mean – how are you supposed to share a link with someone, given that the vast majority of sites are now using CPS systems (like WordPress) that lead to long URLs, when the URL itself is longer than the 140 character limit.

So you can get a bit of text before the URL ShortURL services are used to … well shorten the URL. In fact every post on UpYourEgo has a short URL automatically generated on the right hand menu for that post.

And TinyURL now lets you create personalised URLs as well – I recently created one for the new Top Trumps show on five (that I wanted to post to Twitter) and was able to use tinyurl.com/toptrumpsd5 and even more recently I used tinyurl.com/deadyet for a link to a funny site about the Large Hadron Collider.

The problem with this though is that all the useful urls will be gone pretty quickly and then you’ll be left with a selection of choices that may as well just be random.

There is also the chance that 1) the site hosting the URL could give up, get bored, shut down or go out of business and 2) they could start charging for custom URLs or even random ones (although this is unlikely as people don’t like paying for things on the web).

Recently, during a debate on the merits of microblogging – Leo Laporte, one of the hardest working men in the world of online video streaming, suggested that as sites like Twitter grow to a point of unsustainability – it would be better to host communities around a product/idea/service or brand and have them all linked together.

So he launched Twit Army – this is for fans of the Twit Network to use as their social networking service and I believe your posts can also be published on Twitter.

So, using the GNU licenced Laconica software I could set up my own microblogging platform at nuts.upyourego.com that automatically re-posted to Twitter and everywhere else – as well as letting users of the EgoNuts platform communicate in a more specialised environment.

I’m not going to because, my theory is that about 3% of the readers of a blog or listeners of a podcast would actually join an associated community – in which case that would probably be me and my dad.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t played with the idea of a Microblogging platform – I recently launched JerseyGuardian.co.uk – a simple microblogging site for people in Jersey to post what is on their mind right now – using WordPress as a platform.

I’ll write a post specifically about this another time as it requires more explanation than a couple of paragraphs I’m giving it here – but check it out and let me know what you think.

What I have done is launched my own ShortURL site at gtfa.eu or Get the Flip (yes Flip!) Away – You.

It’s a pretty simple interface – you put your long URL in the top box, enter a word (or not – you don’t have to) and click generate.

Underneath it will give you a short url – either to your specification or as a random sequence of numbers – your choice really.

I might develop it more (it’s using some of the shelf code I found online) but as it does what I wanted it to do – I’m happy leaving it as is right now – although I’ll probably replace TinyURL with GTFA on the right hand side shortURL box on this site.

I’d love your feedback.