Bitly takes beta badge off Pro service, lets everyone shorten links with vanity URLs

Bitly’s vanity URL feature was free during the Pro service private beta, and now it’s available to all users at the same low price. Some perks of using a vanity URL, however, are still walled off behind Bitly’s paid service, which is aimed at enterprise customers.

For example, if you want a root domain redirect for your vanity URL (so when users type your http://short.url into a browser they are taken to your site, not Bitly), you’ll have to swim in the adult pool with the likes of Pepsi and New York Times and drop $995/month.

There is certainly a discussion to be had around the pros and cons of using vanity URLs, especially when it comes to their long-term existence and concerns over phishing. For instance: what happens if you stop paying for your short domain, or the clever domain you chose gets yanked because war breaks out in the country of its controlling body? Plus, due to Bitly/j.mp’s popularity and Twitter’s recent policy of shortening links at Twitter.com with t.co, users are getting accustomed to trusting those short URL domains a little more (I sometimes use 1fps.me to shorten URLs, and followers have asked me on multiple occasions whether the tweet or URL was genuine or if “I got hacked”.

But who knows, maybe that trust will teeter back a little since Bitly has released custom domain support to the masses for free and is actively promoting it. And maybe Twitter clients and other services can work in some sort of safety check so users can verify whether a short URL was created with Bitly’s tools.

(Source: chartier)

Reblogged 11 months ago from chartier

5 notes

Thom Allen Weblog

Bitly takes beta badge off Pro service, lets everyone shorten links with vanity URLs

Posts I Like