NYT Joining the Fun?

Apparently, there's a skunkworks project within the New York Times to build a url shortener: http://ezclip.net/zBk2WO. THe idea is to build a trusted url shortener that only works with NYT articles.

In the same article, I learned that TechCrunch, Unhub, and LNK.by also have url shorteners. Who doesn't have one?

Birthday Problem With Short Url Generation

Let's introduce a little math to our fun. EZ Clip uses a code of length 6 for each url it generates. Since we employ a 62-character alphabet (upper and lower case letters plus 10 digits), we have a possible space of 62^6 =56,800,235,584 codes. Applying math from the birthday problem, we determine that once we hit about 280,000 links, there will be a greater than 50% probability that a generated code will be a duplicate.

280,000 is a shockingly small number when you consider there are over 56 billion possible codes. In the birthday problem, it only takes 23 people to push the odds of two people sharing the same birthday over 50%.

Detailed Statistics

Now you can get detailed statistics about your shortened url.  Here is an example.

Statistics

Some rudimentary statistics are now available.

Bookmarklet

To make EZ Clip even easier to use, we now have a bookmarklet.

Url Shortener Hate

This url shortener hate post by Joshua Schacter has attracted lots of attention.

Analysis of URL Shorteners

Here's a detailed review of url shorteners. Pay attention to the embedded chart. Interesting, is.gd, which is consistently ranked in the 5, lacks most of the features of the other shorteners.

EZ Clip Release 0.1

Introducing EZ Clip 0.1, a url shortening service . In a space crowded with tinyurl.com, bit.ly, and is.gd, why another url shortening service? In a word, simplicity. No ads and no instructions. Paste your url, click on Shrink button, and a newly shortened url will await you. Give us a try at ezclip.net.