Looks neat — just a heads up, be prepared for malicious users to find the service and immediately start using it for harmful redirects. I ran into this pretty early on when I launched T.LY, so it’s something worth thinking about from the start.
I ended up building an entire service to detect these URLs as soon as possible, protecting the service. Happy to give you some tips, just reach out.
I appreciate your feedback, and I completely agree with you that malicious users would immediately start to exploit it. Although I remain confident (for now), that the service's peek/info features help protecting innocent users from such activities. If it fails to deliver that safety, I will definitely implement something that you mentioned.
I would always love to hear feedback, so you should just reach out as well if you have anything in mind.
Perhaps this other company can do better and never face that problem...
Anyone could have predicted that link shortner failure was a problem from the moment they sprang into being. Many did. The article's proposal is to just do more of the same instead of learning the lessons of the past.
Google runs on a scale much larger than most companies think. To run and operate Goo gl, they didn't see enough value even though millions of people used it.
Often times when Google shutdowns a product, it still has millions of users which is great for smaller businesses to step in and grow. That is what I was able to do creating T.LY around the same time Google announced the shutdown.
Do you really think Google is going away anytime soon? Google and its ads are the backbone of much of the free internet. Without ads, we’d likely see most sites with paywalls. On the other hand, AI services have a chance to hurt Google if they don't catch up.
