Microsoft fails with its binged.it URL shortener, which is longer than bing.com
Microsoft is pushing out a new URL shortener. If everyone else is doing it then why not, I guess. However, binged.it surely isn’t the best option when it comprises nine characters compared to the eight of bing.com.
I don’t quite understand the current trend for every company, service, and Web site having their own URL shortener. Do we really need all of these? Wouldn’t one universally used and respected URL shortener be a better option? And wasn’t bit.ly doing a good enough job? And TinyURL before that?
Apparently not, as the last few months have seen Google, YouTube, Digg, Facebook, and many others all join the ranks. And now Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon, noticeably late as usual.
As first spotted by My Microsoft Life, Microsoft execs working on Bing have started using the binged.it URL shortener. Microsoft has been using binged.it internally for a while, and is likely to roll it out to the public very shortly.
However, as MG Siegler at TechCrunch noted, there is one small problem. If the idea of a URL shortener is to shorten the URL (and the name would suggest as much) shouldn’t the default chosen be shorter than the full name of the site complete with suffix?
Unless I, and Siegler, and countless commenters are wrong, Microsoft’s URL shortener is longer than the full domain name it’s meant to be replacing.
Of course, the number of characters isn’t the only factor at play here. Microsoft obviously wants to tap into the ‘to Google’ mindset by trying to promote Bing by suggesting we ‘Binged It’. Which isn’t a bad idea, and is certainly a reasonable attempt at scraping away at Google’s dominance of the search market.
However, with the trend being for shorter and shorter URLs, surely binged.it represents a failure on Microsoft’s part.
Related Posts:
January 17th, 2010
it never said it was shortening the bing url, it’s shortening the original the url.
it’s not that big of a deal to label it a failure. i could care less about the 1 or 2 characters more binged.it has, as long as it works.
this is a non-issue.
January 17th, 2010
Seriously? Do you have a CLUE Dave what a URL shortener DOES? Or is ll you can do is find some anti-MS blog post elsewhere and regurgitate it hear by rearranging some words and not crediting the source? Pretty trashy of Blorge to continue paying for you for your plagiarism.
From my BlackBerry Storm…
January 17th, 2010
LOL I guess he cannot keep up with changing trends, DavidB…perhaps he does not know a URL shortener replaces URLs that are like 20 or 30 characters – or more, instead he thinks binged.it replaces only bing.com hahaha…
January 17th, 2010
I Guess Microsoft went nuts after failure of Bing .