Today we launched a new solution + API. Since more and more (mobile) application use short-url redirectors like tinyurl.com or twurl.com a lot of usefull (semantic) information gets lost. An url can tell a lot about the content of a page, and what you can expect before visting. By turning an url in a short one, its like reading a book without a cover. Normally you can’t bother, but when you use your mobile phone for browsing, you don’t want to wait 30+ seconds to discover what the content is of that tinyurl somebody posted through twitter. You want more information.
Therefor we developed a new automata which can handle a short-url request and give all usefull information back in XML (and soon Json). At the moment this xml-file contains: Source-Url, Target-Url, Domain Name, Title(tag) of the target url and since a lot of people are using tweetburner.com it will even show the twurl stats. Other elements will be added, for example we’re working on a parser to create pure text content from a page for happy mobile browsing.
Twitstat.com is already using our new API, for the purpose we intented; all the short-url are rewritten in the mobile version, so you can instantly see to which website you will be redirected.
For more information or access to the API, contact Tristan (tristanATw3lab.nl)
Tags projects
March 14th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
This seems similar to what the Power Twitter Firefox Add-on does. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9591
April 4th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Hi Tristan,
We’ve been using bitly and need to expand our URL shortening to other services such as TinyURL. Your service looks like exactly what we’re looking for…