<story><title>Non-Libyan URL Shortener</title><url>http://gadaf.fi/index.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soult</author><text>While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest.&lt;p&gt;Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl-&amp;#62;longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this:&lt;p&gt;- URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature that bit.ly doesn&apos;t have.&lt;p&gt;- People actually don&apos;t care about feature and continue to use bit.ly.&lt;p&gt;- Spammers discover the shortener and abuse it.&lt;p&gt;- Owner closes the shortener because he can&apos;t deal with the spam.&lt;p&gt;All that remains are some non-functional links.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wladimir</author><text>URL shorteners are evil. It&apos;s the digital equivalent of stepping into a car driven by a stranger, blindfolded. You don&apos;t know where you&apos;re going before you&apos;re there. It might not necessarily be a pleasant place.</text></comment>
<story><title>Non-Libyan URL Shortener</title><url>http://gadaf.fi/index.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soult</author><text>While it is a funny play on all those .ly domains and the fact that vb.ly got seized by the Libyan government, it is my opinion that yet another URL shortener is a stupid way of protest.&lt;p&gt;Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl-&amp;#62;longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this:&lt;p&gt;- URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature that bit.ly doesn&apos;t have.&lt;p&gt;- People actually don&apos;t care about feature and continue to use bit.ly.&lt;p&gt;- Spammers discover the shortener and abuse it.&lt;p&gt;- Owner closes the shortener because he can&apos;t deal with the spam.&lt;p&gt;All that remains are some non-functional links.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>warp</author><text>That sounds like a useful thing to do.  Does Urlteam have a website somewhere?  A quick search didn&apos;t turn up much information.</text></comment>