All people who use Twitter, they certainly know, and people like me who has been presence on the Internet they already knew "URL short skewers. If you have a terribly long URL and you have only a limited disk space or you just want the URL is easy to give someone, they are easy to use.
TinyURL was one of the first providers (2002) of this service. With the advent of Twitter, the services of bit.ly and ow.ly were becoming very popular. Besides the austere ow.ly, has bit.ly also an additional service that allows you to track the statistics of your shorter URL. This is very cool because you can see if your URL is used and is alive if you post it to your Facebook or Twitter account.
But it could be soon over for these .ly domains, because today the domain request for vb.ly has been seized by the Libyan government for failure to comply with Islamic law. And now this has all .ly url shorteners on high alert. You may be wondering how this is possible and what kinds of impact will this have on nonprofits?
Some Background
A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is a two letter Internet top-level domain used or reserved for a country, a sovereign state, or a dependent territory. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority determines a trustee for each ccTLD and administration and control is then delegated to that trustee. This trustee enforces policies and operation of the domain. Since .ly is used and operated by Libya, they are within in their jurisdiction to seize domains that don't comply with their laws. In the case of vb.ly the Libyan trustee felt that "that the content of [their] website was offensive, obscene and illegal according to Libyan Islamic Sharia Law".
Could this impact popular URL shorteners like bit.ly and ow.ly? Absolutely.
Impact on Nonprofits
Bottom line. Panick! Just kidding. If your nonprofit shares links anywhere (email, social networks, on your own website, etc) using .ly shorteners and that .ly shortener is seized, these links will no longer work. Yikes! Here are some options you may want to consider. Look for alternative URL shorteners such as Google's new version goo.gl which has some basic tracking stats.
QR code
If Goo.gl integrates with Google Analytics in the future it will become quite powerful. One powerful toy is there already. Look at the right top of the image, you will see a black square, this thing is called a "QR code". A QR Code is a matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera, and smartphones. This QR code can contain 4296 characters and numerical characters 7089. Nice to know, but what's in it for me? Well this QR code can also contain an URL to your website or in this case to your shortened URL from Google. That is cool isn't it? So now you can track how many people are using your QR code.
What are your favorite URL shorteners that aren't affiliated with .ly?
Published on October 06, 2010 in 
make your own QR-code:
http://lapin-bleu.net/software/qtqr/