I've often wondered how long it will take to run out of room on the Internet. While writing for a more tech-related magazine in the early 2000s, I followed the movement from IPv4 to IPv6. It made me feel a little like Christopher Columbus standing at the end of the world looking down off a cliff into the brave new world.
IPv6 is the next-generation Internet protocol intended to open more IP addresses than the current IPv6 technology. The technology aims to support and interconnect all the computers, televisions, advertisements, etc., that can identify, measure and record clicks and conversions. It aims to make search easier, too.
The introduction this week of Google URL Shorter, the tool that lets people shorten URLs, made me think once again about IPv6. I'm pretty sure that most people who share links know these tools squeeze a long URL into fewer characters to make it easier to share with others, but I'll explain anyway.
Are we running out of shorter URLs? The more pages and sites plastered on the Web, the longer the URLs get. And there are plenty of pages posted daily. In a Webcast Tuesday, Google said that last month 15 million Web sites were created -- and estimated that within the space of one day, about 900,000 blog posts are posted.
Google's tool is an update to the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. Software engineers at the company -- Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins -- tell us in a blog posted Monday that people share a lot of links, particularly on microblogging services like Twitter. "With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind -- and that's why people use them," the Google engineers wrote.
Google wasn't the only one on Monday to announce a new URL shortening tool. One of the more widely used is by Bit.ly, which also announced the release of a premium shortener called Bit.ly Pro. The tool allows sites to create custom URLs for their own domains.
As part of the initial beta program, the company will make custom URLs available to a limited number of large and medium-sized Web publishers and bloggers, including AOL, Bing, Clicker, The Huffington Post, MSN, The New York Times, The Onion, and The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.
Bit.ly also introduced a real-time dashboard that will provide publishers with more information about their bit.ly traffic. The tool provides a "real-time view" of how a given publisher's content is being distributed across networks like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and services like email, SMS, and Instant Messenger.
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009
MediaPost Publications Tools To Shorten URLs: Helping To Evade The End Of The Internet? 12/15/2009
via mediapost.com
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