ASK STEVE #6 - TinyURL (or clone) could become next Digg or Del.icio.us
By Steve Poland • August 17, 2007
I’m behind on answering advice questions and apologize to those who have submitted any. Keep the questions coming in and I will get to them. -Steve
Ivan sent in a link to his service called YooRL, which is basically a service that shortens a URL (like tinyurl or urltea) and then keeps track of what links are used/clicked in real-time — which they turn into a popularity chart on their homepage.
I think it’s a great idea — if he were to focus the service the way I just said. Honestly, TinyURL is sitting on a goldmine of data that isn’t being used to its’ full potential — I think the site could become another source for people to see popular items on the web, much like how digg (# of votes) and del.icio.us (# of real-time bookmarks) show popular items.
I would do a Google Maps mashup based on the IP of users accessing each URL and do a geo-IP lookup, then show this map for each URL that shows all the locations of users that have accessed the URL. You could even make this interactive like TwitterVision, showing location accesses in real-time — or simulating how the URL spread.
I would also let website owners grab a JavaScript include snippet that they could put in the header of their webpages to further track how their webpages’ popularity ranks across the world in real-time. You could eventually start trimming this data, so that maybe there are the ‘top news stories’ across the world (using all URLs of news sites), and eliminating the login URLs of like Amazon.com that get accessed millions of times per day.
Note: To somewhat alleviate miscalculations — only allow each IP to count as 1 visit, because a user may visit their own webpage/URL 50x and that would skew the data.
So Ivan — I like the idea; and who knows if TinyURL will ever shift their data into the way you’re speaking of. If you can get consumers (average web users) to start using your service, then you’re onto something. Because I believe TinyURL users are likely hard-core geeks — and I’d imagine that average web users just send links the way they are, not knowing something like TinyURL exists. But I think you could get their attention to use your service by promoting the fact that they can watch their URL spiral through the web. (Other name/tagline ideas for your service: catch fire, spread like wildfire, pyramid out, progress, trail)
I’d also change your service so that you’re focused on shortened URLs that don’t use questions marks / parameters (i.e. instead of ... it should be ... — no question marks, underlines, or case sensitivity — which you can do by creating a 404 catch-all redirect script. Basically that URL doesn’t physically exist on your server, thus it hits your 404 page, which then runs a script to determine what URL to pull from the DB. See end of this post for more details.).
I’d also break-up the page to have some tabs — one for webpages, one for photos, one for videos. On your overall homepage, show the top 10 for each of those 3 items in 3 columns — take a page from the books of del.icio.us and digg. Make it so a user can quickly see what’s hot — you don’t need 150px height for each item, make it more like 50px high, so users will see more links on a page at once and click from there (note: digg uses 150px height, so maybe I’m wrong). Also make this all available as an RSS feed — all the items together and separate (photos; videos; webpages).
I would drop ‘flash’ as a search criteria, because typically someone doesn’t send a link that ends in ‘.swf’ and otherwise how could you determine if a webpage is focused on a Flash game/video — because there might simply just be a ‘.swf’ ad on the page or header of the website.
Also note that TinyURL doesn’t require a user to register/login — there’s something to be said for that. Let a user not have to register/login — and thus, then let anyone see the stats on a specific URL. Also note, you’ll likely want to issue different tracking URLs for the same URL — so that users can track their own instance of a URL; but then on the back-end, keep track of all the same URLs as one URL for your hot lists.
Good luck Ivan and team!
-Steve
All: If you are unfamiliar with a URL shorten service, it takes a long URL like ... that may get messed up if you were to IM or email that to someone. Instead, using TinyURL, that same URL is represented as ....
His original email:
Hello Steve,
My name is Ivan, I am a constant reader of techquilashots, and one of the founders of a new service YooRL.com.
The service is at a pre-beta quality, this should change in around 2 - 4 weeks from now, when a compete redesign also comes out. There are three more founders (the project is 100% self funded right now) and two hired/attrackted people devoting their free time to this project.
We are located in St. Petersburg, Russia. This is our first web startup, and we’d love to hear what you think about our idea and project!
There isn’t much content yet, due to our location and the need to move the project to the western (english speaking) community first - we cannot send yoorls to our Russian contacts :-).
Here’s a short description:
Yoorl service provides a way to monitor the spread of links to web resources, and their popularity, in real time. This is done independently of the web resource, its contents, and the means by which the link to that resource is shared (IM, forums, email, air mail etc).
Once a link is shared the initial sender, as well as the yoorl community can watch, in real time, what is happening to that link. Weather the people who the link was sent to, viewed it; how long they spent on this resource; whether this resource was found interesting and thus spread further; the demography of the spread; how many people are viewing the resource at this very moment.
It is an amazing new experience for users, to feel, the power of the web: when an interesting link is sent simply to a couple of people on the contact list, to see it spread exponentially within a few minutes grabbing the attention of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people.
It is a greater promotional opportunity for web resources, since the users who share links, will be getting a new more fun experience out of it (as well as promotions inside the ‘yoorl’ community). Not to mention that more users will be attracted to sharing resources.
It is a new tool for marketing analysis of the spread of web resources.
It is a way to form a relevant and regularly updated, user rated catalog and search of web resources.
A community is formed around the service, by creating a public catalog of web resources, yoorl blogs, competitions, similar features to social bookmarking.
Hope to hear from you soon,
-Ivan Yakovenko
His follow-up email after I hadn’t replied yet:
Hello,
We’re working on a service that enables people to track the popularity/resonance the links they find and send to their friends (in real time).
We first got this idea when one of our co-workers got a link to a Desktop tower defense game (I’m sure you’ve heard of it): ....). He IMed it to the whole office and to some of his friends on the contact list. Everyone from the office got the same link from people not connected to the initial recipients. We were just wondering whether this link could have actually come from the chain that our co-worker started, and what kind of resonance a link like that makes once sent out. Whipped up a simple proof of concept script to track sent links. Having spent around a week endlessly sending out links via our prototype system, we found it amazing, how a link that gets sent to only a couple of contacts can make it a couple of times around the world eventually boomeranging back to you (Lost a couple of beers betting whose link is going to make the most resonance too 
). We sat down and whipped up a service that is currently online at:
...
Besides being a fun way to track links (in REAL TIME), this service enables us to form a very relevant rating. Positions of resources in our rating depend on the resonance that a link makes.
We are currently working on a bookmarklet to enable easier/faster creation of YooRLs. And services for bloggers etc. That would enable site-owners to easily wrap the links in their blogs into YooRLs and later monitor, and display the spread rate, demographics etc.
What do you think of our service? Do you think it’s worth working on? Any obvious flaws? Ideas?
Thanks,
-Ivan Yakovenko
...
PS: We love your blog! Great to see you back and writing.
Comments
5 Responses to “ASK STEVE #6 - TinyURL (or clone) could become next Digg or Del.icio.us”
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Thanks Steve.
Maybe I misunderstood something, but some of the things you suggested are ALREADY implemented in YooRL:
“I would do a Google Maps mashup based on the IP of users accessing …… TwitterVision, showing location accesses in real-time — or simulating how the URL spread.”
- Exactly that is in the DASHBOARD (except it’s not using google maps).
“Also note, you’ll likely want to issue different tracking URLs for the same URL — so that users can track their own instance of a URL; but then on the back-end, keep track of all the same URLs as one URL for your hot lists.”
- This is the default behavior (people can track instances of URLs, see general URL stats, and doain stats).
I’d also like to note, that “flash” is not detected automatically (though, maybe it should
), it’s input by the user who posts a YooRL.
Once again, thanks, for your post! Maybe you could find YooRL useful for tracking the links YOU share on your blog?
-Ivan
That’s a very interesting idea. There may be some privacy issues for TinyURL to open this data up, but a new company could certainly do it.
We sure hope we can, Ed.
We just need help spreading the word
I’d clean up the URLs so that they don’t have a question mark or parameters in them. I’d also just call the service ‘Yoorl’, without the capitalization of ‘RL’. But that’s just my opinion.
We’ll be working on the URLs this week.
The RL, kind of got stuck from the beginning. Might change this later.