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My plan is a little less on the dark side than that. Sub-domain access, tagging, mobile transcoding / content adaptation, API access for Twitter and FaceBook applications. You know a bit of social 2.0 juicyness....

I like the email idea, i know a company doing somethng similar with 07 style numbers and voip in the I'm, they simply charge by premium SMS. Another great idea like that is temporary fax numbers, send your email address in a text to the number and it bills you a quid and a half a month for fax to email.

Loads of twists on the temporary services idea that could turn coin.....

as for url redirection stuff i've no dark plans but if it ever got to a stupid number of click throughs on the urls each day i'd he tempted to throw a forced preview page that's ad-heavy.

http://www.spambox.us

I use it all the time

mobtex wrote:

Does anyone here use a url shortening service at all?

What features would  you add to tinyurl?

I do on ocassion and the main thing i'd like to change is to be able to customize the URL a little more

that is all

exactly Norhtie!

might be pushing it but instead of this

[http://tinyurl.com/northie/?links=1]

could it be something like this:

[http://northie.tinyurl.com/?links=1]

suggesting that because people (or maybe just me )  often focus on the first part of the url

Sweet, sweet and sweet, thanks for the ideas folks! It's why I love to have the odd brainstorm over here more than any other forum!

http://wholeurl.com That's the site I bought and this is more how it's going to look when it's done: http://mobtex.net/uploads/565009.jpg - still a long way to go with it yet but it should be pretty functional and pretty funky too I hope.

For me this thing needs to be really user friendly on a mobile phone so if you set up a tag all you need to do on your mobile is save wholeurl.mobi then enter the tag on the form and it will show you a mobile friendly version of the url.

Tags are going to be core and I want to add an element for private tagging you can have the tag SR and the private key 123 so then only you (or someone who's life is boring and time rich) would be able to access the link behind it.

If you look at the preview, there's a 'not safe for work' tick box which I thought was a good idea, this will first click through to an ad-rich forced preview page but only when the URL is NSWF. It should, out of respect for the clicker, warn them if it's not the kind of thing you want on your work Internet access log or the boss seeing you browsing in work time. It relies on people checking the box for NSWF but it's a nice 'safe' idea in theory.

So we want:

tag.wholeurl.com
wholeurl.com/tag
secret.tag.wholeurl.com
wholeurl.com/secret.tag

Plus a mobile web form where you can enter the tag or the secret and the tag

No query strings needed as wildcarded sub-domains and htaccess can do the grunt-work. Also ? can be a bitch to find on a mobile so I'm going for as easy to type as possible.

Bookmarkets? That's easy to sort. Drag and drop javascript element.

The killer thing to go with it would be a FireFox plugin where you can right click a page or a link and have a 'Submit to WholeURL' option - anyone got any suggestions on who can do that for me? Anyone commissioned a simple FireFox extension before - and no I don't want to learn another language and add another skill and job to my list before someone suggests I dev it myself......

Tags are a good idea, but I like matte's suggestion for a "Give Me One", or suggest some that are available if the one the user enters is already taken.

Maybe even something like:

tag.username.wholeurl.com
tag.username.wholeurl.com/secret
wholeurl.com/tag/
wholeurl.com/tag/secret
tag.wholeurl.com/secret

I dont know, something like that...I know the / can be hard to find on a mobile device.

what about:

tag.wholeurl.com and
secret.tag.wholeurl.com

There's alot of ways you could do it. I guess whatever makes sense.

Keep us updated once your site's up and running!

Mob,
Back to original question (from the nontechy POV, as usual). Yeah, I have a shortened version of my you've-got-to-be-kidding elongated freebie original site down to at-least-I-can-remember-it-now size! Got it thru another freebie site -- Bravenet (so you can check out what they offer to compare. Yes, it is a dotcommer) 

Your site might trump what I have, 'cept, not sure 'bout all the numbers stuff. Do you plan just to use numbers only? If it takes off, that can ended up being almost as long as the you've-got-to-be-kidding size, or folks having to remember digits that make Social Security numbers seem easy to memorize. Have you considered KWs instead of numbers? I'd rather have tinyurl.teddies, then tinyurl.12745894547505, which means nothing to anyone.

BTW -- cool idea, and...also love the idea of temp e-mail addys! Sure beats sending everything to dietdecafcola thru Yahoo! -- my junk e-mail addy that I never check.