Any business using Twitter, Facebook, or other social media knows that short URLs are a great way for people to share your links without taking up all of the characters available in the message.  i.e. Instead of me trying to tweet this full URL, http://www.fyindout.com/blog/generalinfo/social-media-maven, which eats up 69 of my 140 characters, I can use a service like bit.ly to send this URL out, http://bit.ly/vxg54, which is only 19 characters. This leaves more space for someone to add a comment along with the link and that’s a good thing.

Now there are tools out there such as awe.sm that even allow you to use your own custom short URL domain to share.  So now sites like TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), Yoast (yoa.st) and others use custom short URLs to share their links while building their brand.

As we continue to add functionality to our site, we also looked at creating a custom short URL to build our brand, however when we looked into it we had concerns about whether we were stepping into a grey area when it came to the URLs and domains we liked. 

Here’s what I mean.  As the team tried to come up with a good short URL, the one we liked the most was fyind.it.  When we looked into it, the .it domain is set up to represent companies or people that live in Italy.  Obviously, we did not meet those criteria.  The .ch domain (tcrn.ch) is designated for entities in Switzerland, .ly (bit.ly) for Libya, .pr (StumbleUpon’s su.pr short URL) is Puerto Rico, etc.  You will not find these domains available on your standard US domain name registrars such as GoDaddy and Network Solutions.  When we tried to look for and buy fyind.it, we only found a few registrars that would do so and the deal was that they would have ownership of the URL (they were in Italy) and would give us permission to use it.  I’m not saying it’s shady but it didn’t pass our “feels right” test so we didn’t pursue it.  I can’t speak to the restrictions on any of the other domains mentioned as we didn’t look into them and I doubt they’re as strict if the previously mentioned sites are using them.

Even with everything being on the up-and-up, our team ended up discussing this possible trend further.  What happens if everyone starts buying short URLs with other country domains.  Doesn’t that totally muddy and therefore, nullify the whole point and meaning behind those domains?  If things end up where there are more owners of URLs with a country domain outside of that country, then is it no longer that country’s domain and more of a functional designation such as .biz or .org?  If things get out of hand, will ICANN step in and clear all URLs not owned by country residents out? Will it become a big item where the registrars that allow outsiders to buy URLs with country domains will charge ridiculous fees in order for them to keep them?

We don’t know the answer to any of these, but it was something worth discussing over beverages.  We ended up going with fyind.biz and you should be seeing it soon with our next release.  If you have any experience or insight on the use of country domains by non-citizens regarding custom short URLs, please feel free to add comments.

Tags: awe.sm, bit.ly, country domains, custom short URLs, TechCrunch, Yoast

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under General Info, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.