StumbleUpon’s Exciting Progress

Link short­en­ers seem to be the whip­ping boy of the Inter­net right now, every­where I turn some­one is grip­ing about their evils, and their faults, and how they are going to be the down­fall of the Inter­net. And yet, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon, Bit.ly, Face­book and oth­ers are all work­ing on this in var­i­ous ways.

Digg and Face­book both use iframe wrap­pers to put a tool­bar at the top of the win­dow, offer­ing the user enhanced func­tion­al­ity but in turn cloak­ing the con­tent owner’s site and gen­er­ally being uncool. Site own­ers, ones who are seri­ous about blog­ging and build­ing their fol­low­ing, usu­ally dis­like this as they feel that they lose credit or value from the links and traf­fic.

Stum­ble­Upon has a pri­vate beta going on for their http://su.pr link short­ener and today they released info about some­thing I am VERY keen on. It’s called Supr:Short accord­ing to this page, and it solves a major prob­lem I have with Digg and Facebook’s linking.

Digg and Face­book use iframes to dis­play a javascript tool­bar that pro­vides extra func­tion­al­ity and con­trol back on the home site. This is done using a less than desir­able iframe because it is the only way to main­tain the javascript bar at the top of the win­dow. But Stum­ble­Upon is pro­vid­ing site own­ers with the abil­ity to host the nec­es­sary scripts on their own site by some PHP code and a locally remotely hosted javascript file thus negat­ing the need for the nasty iframe.

The fact that they put the scripts in the con­trol of the user means that every­one wins. The site owner does because they regain the value and the address bar reads their own url. Stum­ble­Upon does because the script sends them the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion and ana­lyt­ics and main­tain their con­trol bar.

The down­side is that it pos­si­bly means issues as site own­ers will need to keep their script up to date. But the gained value more than makes up for the needed maintenance.

I can’t stress enough how excit­ing this pos­si­bil­ity is and that it is a very good direc­tion for link short­en­ers to go. I unfor­tu­nately do not have a beta invite for Stum­ble­Upon, but would love to get one to play with this new development!

Update: — Min­utes after I posted this, Stum­ble­Upon released 250 more beta codes into the pub­lic. I suc­cess­fully snatched one and have imple­mented the SuprShort code on the site. I’ll test it over the next few weeks and write a follow-up detail­ing my expe­ri­ence. Just a heads up, if you came to this page from http://trickjarrett.com/3gFN then you just used the Su.pr code I talk about above.