Web 2 Ireland

Short.ie is a free URL shortening service allowing you to truncate long unfriendly web addresses into a short and easy to use URLs, perfect for email, IM, Twitter and Texts.

This isn't the first URL shortening service but it's definitely my favourite for one main reason, the data it provides about the URLs I have shortened. When I shorten a URL, I can see how many people have clicked on the links.

Of the many URL shortening services that exist, the majority provide super short URLs but I haven’t seen any that provide numbers on how many people clicked on my links. This can be very handy. You could send out a text or a mail shot and see how many people are clicking on your links.

Or how about shortening your email address? Your email address is probably short enough already but it could be a great way to fool those email harvesting bots trawling your site for your email address.

Short.ie is an open collaboration between Iarfhlaith Kelly, David Coallier and myself. We have been adding new services to it, building out on the original idea. So far, here's what we've got:

• Regular URL Shortening
• Custom URL Shortening
• Click Tracking
• View All Shortened Links (per user)
• Content Recommendations
• An API
• A Firefox Plugin
• A bookmarklet for IE and FF.

We're also working on:

• Connecting people who link to the same things
• RSS feeds per registered user
• Displaying popular links on the homepage
• Displaying most influential users on the homepage (once we get avatars setup)
• Improving the content recommendation engine
• Promoting short.ie any way we can

So far there are over 50 registered users ( Shorties? ) with over 700 URLs shortened and over 5,000 clicks of those URLs! See the chart below for this weeks usage.

We'd love it if you could help spread the word. We've got a lot of plans for Short.ie, so if you haven't already seen it, start shortening some URLs or  follow Short.ie on Twitter.

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