Just thought I’d link to mrBen’s fine utility, Linkpot; just used this to shorten a url for Twitter. The site’s looking very nice indeed.
It’s like tinyurl, but uses dictionary words instead of random alphanumeric strings. Intuitively, this makes the url easier (possible) to remember. One also thinks that we could run out of dictionary words; mrBen? What’s the plan, there? ;-)
There are a number of plans to increase the longevity of the service.
1. From the release of the next upgrade, all new incoming links will, by default, be temporary - most people only want temporary links anyway. Permanent links will be a registration (and possibly even subscription) service.
2. I plan to extend into 2 words - there are ~50k words in my dictionary, extending to two words gives me ~2bn combinations.
There are some other plans for extending the service, and things like that. I hope to have a news/blog and FAQ set up on the site fairly soon.
Cool plans; combining words really does accomplish some instant longevity, great idea.
The “temporary link” idea is great, too… for this sort of service, I can’t think of too many cases where a service like linkpot or tinyurl would be used for links which are intended to be used in perpetuity.