Posted by Toby Inkster on 12/01/88 11:33

Walter wrote:

> From http://tinyurl.com, the best and one of the first URL shortening
> services.

fly.to has been around for about eight years; tinyurl.com roughly three.
TinyURL.com was different from its predecessors though, in that it was
targetted at *visitors* rather than authors.

fly.to (and various other domains owned by the same company, which got
bought up by V3, which got bought up by FortuneCity) allowed website
authors to create a more memorable (and usually shorter) permanent URL for
their site, back when most people were using ISP space, Geocities,
Angelfire and the like.

http://fly.to/me -> http://users.myisp.com/~me/pages/

tinyurl.com creates some very short URLs, but they're not necessarily any
more memorable:

http://tinyurl.com/5nd7w -> http://www.jrhartley.com/books/flyfishing/

Such URLs are not usually used by the website author, but by website
visitors to send long URLs by e-mail, or to cloak the real address behind
a link.

Your site combines the best of both. Use that as your selling point.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

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