BK.LY Launches
We’ve just launched a new website this morning called bk.ly that is designed to serve two purposes: 1) As URL shorteners become a ubiquitous part of the Internet experience, it makes sense to have some kind of local identity to the shortened web addresses, especially in the case of Brooklyn where local pride runs thick;…
We’ve just launched a new website this morning called bk.ly that is designed to serve two purposes: 1) As URL shorteners become a ubiquitous part of the Internet experience, it makes sense to have some kind of local identity to the shortened web addresses, especially in the case of Brooklyn where local pride runs thick; 2) Twitter also provides a powerful way to collect and rank local news. The way site works is pretty simple: If you tweet a link that’s been shortened using the bk.ly URL shortener, it’ll automatically show up in the site’s Tweet stream; likewise, if you append any Tweet with the hashtag #bknews, it will also show up in the stream. The latter will hopefully be used widely for mobile Tweets like “three-car accident at Fulton and South Oxford #bknews”. We’ve also got a Most Popular widget on the site to track which links have been Tweeted the most. (This will soon be available for any bloggers to embed on their own sites.) Within the next couple of weeks, you’ll be able to log into the site with your Twitter username and Tweet directly from bk.ly while tracking the click-through performance of your links. It’s very much an experiment so we look forward to specific suggestions to make it more useful and user-friendly.
URL shorteners obfuscate links, making them untrustable. Twitter would be better served by abandoning the 140 character limit than saddling itself with the growing spam problem shorteners invite.
There’s a great article on the problem with URL shortners here: http://bk.ly/oS
No matter how technical, most things can be described in plain English.
I do believe this post just means that if you tweet something relevant to this site and you put the right code in your tweet, your info will automatically be sent to Mr. B or automatically show up on Brownstoner.
misspriss- oh, you mean after being called a stick in the mud and being told I can’t see the forest for the trees? Oh yeah. sure. Thanks for the feedback. Maybe you should just stick to what you know.
bxgirl, take a chill pill. it was an interesting discussion, but you kind of overreacted, don’t you think, if look over your escalations? Anyway, as I said, I’m not a twitterer, but am thinking of becoming one now with this local application. I think it’s cool and interesting, but I can also completely understand why people wouldn’t like the phenomenon. sometimes the world does feel too noisy these days, but that’s the great thing about opting in or out of something…If I didn’t like being in touch with old friends, I’d be certain to close down my facebook site – it can get really annoying…
I admit only a vague notion of what twitter is. So who wants to give explanation of your personal uses. and how it works.
Only 1 I skim and see here is someone mentioning liking to read twitters about the flea which sounds pretty inane. To each his/her own – but there must be something of value if getting all this buzz.
goldie- if in fact you read you will see I specifically said twitter was not for me. You interpreted that to mean I condemned the whole platform I did not. My twitterphiles comment in a response to insults about those of us who choose not to use it. And now I’m done too. thanks to you and kings making a potentially interesting discussion abpit the nature of technology and social networking into much ado about nothing.
bxgrl – you took one incident and decided an entire platform wasnt a good idea. not much need for psychological analysis there, you said it yourself.
“You certainly have a shallow concept of what either I or rob think- but that’s to be expected form twitterphiles. Short attention spans. Not much depth.”
now that was funny! i hope you see the humor in this pot/kettle/black thing.
im done. too much time wasted on this already.
To be clear, anyone who isn’t using Apple TV is a complete stuck in the mud.
Sorry King, I though you said as much the other day. My mistake.