Adjix has a breakthrough idea in URL shorteners

Monday, April 27, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story. 

1. Guy asked if I could make the app work with his favorite URL shortener, Adjix. I said I'd check it out. 

2. Joe Moreno, the CEO of Adjix, emailed me and showed how to get hit stats from his service, in a manner similar to what I was getting from tr.im. 

3. When I tried to deref one of his short URLs I found he was using the meta-refresh technique. I was irritated, why isn't he using the HTTP redirect mechanism like everyone else. He said it was so they could use Adsense to track clicks. Some of his users wanted it. I found a way to work around the issue without having to parse the HTML and then forgot it. (Here's the text of the page they return.) 

4. A few days later Moreno mentioned in an email that another advantage is their shortener could be served statically from S3. This hit me like a ton of bricks. Say what! 

Think about it. When you shorten a URL, what if instead of generating a record in a database that requires a dynamic server to stay up indefinitely, you generated static HTML and saved it somewhere likely to survive the apocalypse. It's not a complete answer to the problem presented by URL shorteners, but it's pretty great half-step. Maybe even a 3-quarters-step. 

Joe wrote it up here. 

Jake Jarvis calls this an Apocalypse-proof URL shortener. I like!