Cligs Founding Member of Industry URL Mapping Directory Service Initiative

I’m very excited today to announce that Cligs is part of a new industry initiative to create a back-up mapping service for short URLs called 301works. This means if anything bad happens to Cligs, it will not be a disaster as there is a permanent backup stored outside of the service. This initiative already has the support of other leading URL shortners including Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, bit.ly, URLizer, and urlShort. The data will be stored independent of any URL shortener by Gnip, a specialist data storage and distribution company.

How it Will Work for Cligs

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be updating you about how you can opt-into this backup service. I will be working with Gnip to test the data transmission mechanism and be updating Cligs to help you pick which cligs are backed up. There are many considerations for this, and rest assured that nothing will happen without your explicit decision. More details as soon as I can share.

History and Thanks

This idea has been talked about for a while. It was first proposed by Jonathan Strauss of awe.sm and he and I have been discussing its implementation details on and off for a while. With the recent panic about the almost-collapse of tr.im, we as an industry decided to act quickly. Several phone calls at weird hours of the day and emails later, we’ve reached an agreement that I’m very proud and happy about. The URL shorteners industry needs an independent body for this purpose, and I’m glad we all put our healthy competition aside to make sure we as an industry can serve our users better! I would like to thank everyone who helped make this happen including Eric and Shane of Gnip, Jonathan of awe.sm, and the teams at Betaworks and Bit.ly who provided the necessary momentum to actually do this.

Coverage and More Info

• 301works home page: 301works.com.
• Announcement press release.
• CNet
• Techcrunch.
• Mashable.

And if you are a URL shortener, please join us!

This entry was posted on Freitag, August 14th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Cligs News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.