Nektarios is developing a drupal plugin that will make use of urlBorg. He asked me why, urlBorg creates a new short URL every time he makes an API call, even if the target URL is the same. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to get the same short URL? Isn’t it a waste of resources (i.e. storage space) to create and store a new short URL every time?

This is one of the main design decisions I had to do when I started developnig urlBorg. And I’ve changed my mind a couple of times. But I think that creating a new short URL is the right way to go. Here is why.

The creation of a short URL is a “gesture of attention” (if you are not familiar with the term, read Geting a piece of the action: The attention economy). An if a URL shortener is worth something, this is because it is a good database of two kind of “gestures”:
- the one is when someone manifests his interest on a specific URL, by creating a short URL for it.
- the other is when someone clicks on the short URL.

urlBorg keeps track of both. The click stats are visible to anyone, the just have to add /i at the end of a urlBorg short URL, like this Comments (1)

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.