X.vu is doing it wrong. Are you?

June 15th, 2009

Last week someone pointed me to X.vu, which promises to be the shortest of the URL shorteners. I was happy to see it, because I shorten a lot of URLs for Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and because my favorite shortener, IS.gd, has just tripped over into five characters behind the slash. (Like this: http://is.gd/106yp — and yes, this is a Twitter-geek thing.)

X.vu’s tagline is “Because Every Character Counts!” I’m sympathetic, because I can’t believe that people on Twitter are using all kinds of URL shorteners with names like tinyurl.com. I mean, TinyURL runs a good service, but its very name is several characters longer than the absolute minimum, which would seem to contradict the purpose of a URL shortener. X.vu also has an easy one-click way to post a shortened URL to Twitter. Nice.

But X.vu has apparently totally blown its own premise, based on what it puts after the slash. I just went to shorten an address, and got this result:

xvu

The service is new enough that, best I can tell, this really is the 1068th address it has shortened. But if it were really designed to make every character count, the new URL would be something like http://x.vu/gd — because it wouldn’t be counting up using only the decimal digits.

How many URLs can you shorten for each character length if you use only the digits 0 through 9?

  • 1 character = 10
  • 2 characters = 100
  • 3 characters = 1,000
  • 4 characters = 10,000
  • etc.

How many can you shorten for each character length if you use the digits 0 through 9, the lower-case letters a through z, and then the upper-case letters A through Z?

  • 1 character = 62
  • 2 characters = 3,844
  • 3 characters = 238,328
  • 4 characters = 14,776,336
  • etc.

You see my point, which is hardly arcane given that the other shortening services do this.

The moral of the story: it’s not enough to get a good little property (as the X.vu address is), and it’s not enough to build a nice little tool (which they’ve done). You still need to copy your betters where it makes sense to, and avoid designing anything in an avoidably stupid way.

Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Internet

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7 Comments so far

Ari Herzog June 15th, 2009 3:24 pm

Makes you wonder which is shorter: x.vu which adds four digits, or u.nu which adds four digits. Here’s your blog post shortened: http://u.nu/3a8c

They all claim to be the shortest, but none of them are.

Nedra June 15th, 2009 3:31 pm

Have you tried u.nu? Another shortening service that looks to be using the right formula plus an easy browser button. All these services, though, become victims of their own success as they get more popular and start getting longer and longer.

Tim Walker June 15th, 2009 3:42 pm

Good points, Ari and Nedra. Reminds me of the plumbers who named themselves “AAAAA Plumbing” so they would show up first in the phone book. Which is great until “AAAAAA Plumbing” or (gasp!) “AAAAAAAA Plumbing” comes along.

What I’m thinking: if you’re going to get into the URL shortening game, you *must* avoid stupid moves, *and* you must have something besides super-duper-shortness that distinguishes you.

Nedra June 15th, 2009 4:16 pm

To answer Ari’s point, like your handy-dandy chart shows, u.nu will be 4 characters for 14 million links but x.vu will roll over into 5 digits after only 10,000 links. You’ll get more mileage for a longer time out of u.nu, until you finally won’t anymore and we’ll all move on to the next one. Except for the people who are still using TinyURL. :-)

Jack Yan June 16th, 2009 3:32 am

I was so very surprised about this and thought, ‘Surely no one would be daft enough to not use other glyphs.’ But I can confirm the story with the 1,181st shortened URL.

Tim June 16th, 2009 6:44 am

X.vu is my prefered Url shorter at the moment, and probably will be for a long time. I see the negative points here and would like to remind everyone that this is the beta version. Which means they’re still working on it! So instead of complaining about the numbers only (which I find good since it’s easy to remember and it’s telephone proof) why don’t you use the FEEDBACK button on the website? and tell them directly ? Anyway I have some ideas which I’m going to send as feedback, hopefully they’ll be added in the future. And anyway whatever happens, it will always be better then TinyURL.com!! ;)

Tim Walker June 16th, 2009 7:46 am

Thanks for the comment, Tim. Two things:

1. Beta or no beta, using characters along with numbers is standard practice for the shortening services, to the point that it should be implemented as a matter of course at the pre-alpha stage. Not saying their failure to do so makes X.vu evil or anything, just that it’s fair to point out that they’ve missed a serious opportunity here.

2. I’m not complaining, if by that you mean “whining.” (Not saying you’re implying that, just that the two words are often used interchangeably.) I’m pointing out a significant — and obvious — shortcoming in the service. Also, by putting up this post I’m *both* giving X.vu feedback (since they should be scouring the Web for mentions and linkbacks) *and* publicizing their service.

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