It’s an old joke, I’ve always herd it by americans:
- How do you call someone that speaks two languages?
- Bilingual
- How do you call someone that speaks three languages?
- Trilingual
- How do you call someone that speaks one language?
- American.

No pun intended. It’s a joke.

But, I’m always amazed by US-based web start ups that don’t support unicode. Why think small?

I’d happily switch to Pownce, IF I could write in Greek. Unfortunately, I can only write in latin1, which leaves out Greek, as well as Cyrilic alphabet, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. I stick to twitter.

I’d give a chance to Yahoo! Mail -if UTF-8 support didn’t suck so much. GMail, GMail, Gmail.

I’d base a web TV channel I’m involved in (with a possibly huge audience in Greece) on Brightcove -if only I could write video titles and descriptions in my language. I’ll have to put up with YouTube’s limitations.

Oh, well. On the other hand this leaves a lot of space for some competition

I asked urlBorg users to rate the app in the AppEngine application gallery and got some enthusiastic comments:

One of the best url shortening tools - jim.hellas - May 24, 2008
UrlBorg has a very simple interface, provides personal account and helps you keep track of your urls. Simply the best

The best out there! - kostis_at_quatzacoalt.com - May 24, 2008
My choice for URL shortening! Useful features! I’m sure more are on the way!

Great stuff - stefanos.kofopoulos - May 24, 2008
…now running on scalable environment.

urlBorg rules! - niels.vaneck - May 24, 2008
Scalable url shortening in combination with user accounts makes for a very useful service.

Wow! Thank you!

urlBorg has two new features:

1. It will keep a record of all the “short URLs” you’ve created, with stats (number of clicks). This is a nice way to keep track of the URLs you’ve created but also to see how many clicks each one of them had.

2. It will keep a record of all urlBorg short URLs you’ve clicked on. This is an optional feature, you have to enable it explicitly. I often find myself looking for “that link to a funny video someone posted on twitter yesterday”. Well if this someone used urlBorg to create short links, now I will find it in my history.

To use both of them, you have to login of course. But I took advantage of AppEngine’s Users API which means that if you already have a GMail account you login using it -no registration, etc. (I know I should have used OpenID, but for now it was so much simpler to use Google’s authentication -but OpenID is on the ToDo list).

Now, if someone could advice me on what is the right format to export the attention data gathered, so that users are able to reuse them and move them around, please let me know.

At the top of each page on urlBorg you will se a link named “account”. Click on it and login using your GMail account.

You will be redirected to your urlBorg account page, where you will se the option “enable previews”. Previews are simple pages that look like this (here, I take advantage of a hidden urlBorg feature: if you add /p at the end of a short URL you “force” the preview to show up). Their obvious value is to protect you from going to pages you wouldn’t like to visit, but their URL is hidden by urlBorg.

I think “previews” can be much more. Here are a couple of features I already implemented.

MP3 files
If a URL goes to an MP3 file (determined by the MIME type reported by the hosting server), the preview will also show you flash mp3 player that allow you to listen to it. Here is an example.

maps
For this one, I have to thank Raphael from U.[lik]. Raphael is has been using urlBorg to share links to Google Maps (those links can be long and ugly). Now, if you link to a page in Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps, the preview will also display a link to the other service, where you will se the same map.

Here is a Google Maps expample (again, note the /p at the end of the URL) and a Yahoo! Maps example. You don’t have to do something special. urlBorg will examine the structure of the link and display automagicaly the “extra info”.

So, what do you think?

So, urlBorg has been rewritten in Python and is now hosted on Google AppEngine (make a note, the new address is urlborg.com).

But why build “yet another URL shortening service”, when it’s so easy to build one? Any web developer could build one in less than an hour, couldn’t they?

The truth is that building a URL shortening service is a trivial task. Building one that could scale is not. I designed urlBorg having in mind “will it work if it made it to TechCrunch or if CNN.com made extensive use of it?” Building such a service is not trivial, believe me. (And I won’t know if urlBorg will make it either, but I think it will.)

But scale wasn’t my only motivation. I believe there’s a lot of space to add value to such a simple service. A quick look at the API will reveal some of my ideas -urlBorg goes beyond returning a short URL.

More details to come soon