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.
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