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Comment by Huhty | Hacker News Reader

Isn't there hundreds of services that do this?

Yes, but this is the shortest url I've seen. If every character counts, this is the url shortener to use.

A few years ago, a URL shortener was running on the .to ccTLD itself. That was the shortest possible URL shortener service since there are no single-character TLDs. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work anymore.

there was also another that was using a unicode character (an arrow) as its domain name, not shorter technically, but in any character-counting situation, just as short as s.id

Yeah there was →.ws or something like that. Still longer than "to" though.

We've used http://v.gd for years.

Admit it thats your site

nope. and the homepage clearly says it is sponsored by "memset", whoever they are.

Clearly "memset" != "daurnimator" so yeah Q.E.D.

What are your use cases for shortening links? Is it for print?

All else being equal, sure, but this shortener throws up a branded redirect page for a second instead of just doing an HTTP 301 redirect. IMO, every character would have to count a lot to make up for the bad user experience.

Plus, they can't keep it this short for long. They can only shorten 3,844 URLs before they get up to 8 characters, and only 238,328 before they get up to 9, at which point it's only 3 characters shorter than j.mp. Getting popular will actually hurt their advantage.

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