From the archive (2009): Mister Wong acquires Cligs
1 December 2009: instead of shutting down, Cligs was acquired by Mister Wong. The founder's farewell post as an excerpt, and what the new owners did with it.
From the archive. This post appeared on blog.cli.gs on 1 December 2009, written by Pierre Far, who founded and ran the Cligs URL shortener. We publish an excerpt here because the original address is still linked from around the web; the complete original is preserved in the Wayback Machine. A note from today follows the excerpt. The background is in cli.gs, 2008 to 2026.
Today I am very excited to announce that Cligs has been acquired by Mister Wong! Cligs lives and from now on will continue to grow under the management of an established company with a history of building great Web 2.0 companies. When I announced that Cligs was to shut down, I was contacted by several parties interested in taking over the service. I only considered serious buyers who would obviously take good care of Cligs' existing users.
Kai Tietjen, founder of Mister Wong, summarized their motivation by saying that "Cligs is a complete service with a unique set of tools and a solid user base. Competition is healthy for the market and it would be a real shame to see such a useful service disappear."
Over a year ago when I launched Cligs, I never thought it would grow to be so big so fast. Your feedback and support helped grow Cligs to what it is today.
What happened next
Mister Wong ran the shortener for about two more years. In 2010 it added a preview page at every short link ("This cli.gs URL redirects to…"), which is, incidentally, how we recovered the destinations of thousands of old links from the Wayback Machine in 2026. The service went dark around 2011 and the domain lay idle until it was relaunched as an affiliate network. Pierre Far went on to work at Google on search; this was indeed his last post on this blog. The rest is in cli.gs, 2008 to 2026.