TinyURL Founder of TinyURL Kevin Gilbertson All this user wanted to do, was to be able to convert postings on unicycling newsgroups into Web pages, without having to deal with long, cumbersome URLs. He had run into this problem and just wanted to make his life easier with shorter ones. And so, Kevin Gilbertson, known by his friends as Gilby, created the first URL shortener, TinyURL, in 2002. Gilby didn’t have any particularly big plans for TinyURL either. He just wanted to solve this problem and improve his user experience. I’m almost certain that he had no idea that he was kicking off the soon-to-be rapidly evolving industry of URL shortening.
“It’s a good, simple idea and it’s useful for a lot of people,” he said in an interview with Wired in 2004. So true Gilby, so true. Gilby Launches a Chain Reaction of URL Shorteners With any truly innovative idea, the moment you hear it, you think “Why didn’t I think of it?” That’s how you identify true innovation when the idea sounds like the Cork House Clearance Services perfect and logical progression of something. Such a great idea like this, in this new digital age, obviously caught on like wildfire. The popularity of TinyURLs influenced the creation of at least 100 similar websites. Some of the more prominent ones included MakeAShorterLink.com, SnipURL.com and S I now know way too much about how URL shorteners got started.
CLICK TO TWEET As the web developed, URLs were also becoming longer, so these URL Shorteners were becoming really useful. For instance, when sending an email, very long links ran the risk of wrapping in the email – This would happen when a URL was too long to fit into a single line in the email message, and a line break would automatically be inserted somewhere within the URL. This would result in an error message when the recipient tried to click on it. Not exactly an ideal situation, one that a URL Shortener could fix very easily. However, URL Shorteners also came with their problems. When they shortened the links, the end result would mask the actual domain name of the site containing the information content, being that it was made up of random letters and numbers