Short URL redirection

There are plenty of services that you can find on the web that I would love to have created. TinyURL is definitely one of them : easy, simple and extraordinary efficient!

Principle

A long URL is most of the time unusable : first, you can’t remember it, second, if you send it by email, there are great chances that it end-up “broken” for your recipient and third, on services like twitter with limited number of characters, you don’t want to waste them with long URLs.
Enter your long URL on TinyURL, or URLTea, or even Fon.gs and get an short alias that you can mail, send on twitter, and, if you use Fon.gs, even remember, because you can actually choose the short URL.
When the short URL is entered into a browser or clicks, the service redirects the user transparently to the initial long URL.

Thoughts

Technically, this can’t be more than 100 lines of code with a very simple algorithm. You keep track of all associations between long and shorts URL in a database and that’s pretty much it. The only “problem” is to make sure that you’re not using twice the same short URL for two different long URL.

The business model is however a lot less clear : even advertising seems to be difficult. The only option I can think of is to provide a paying version with APIs to services that might need to use a large number of URL. Jobetudiant.net could for example use the shorter URLs in the emails sent to our members and job seekers, but, hey, if we really needed such a service, would we pay for it or make it ourselves? The only good news on the money side is that such a service is also very cheap to operate and a “donation” based business model could very well be enough to pay the bills. Fon’s approach is maybe the most interesting : provide free little webservices (short URL forwarding) that will promote bigger services (Wifi sharing)…