I am happy to announce that our newest service URLBrief.com has gone live and is now open for public use. URLBrief features the same URL forwarding you have seen with other platforms like TinyURL but features some incredibly powerful enhancements including the use of multiple URLs and TRACKING!!!
To use URLBrief simply go to URLBrief.com and type in the URL you want to forward. You can click "Add Another" to add multiple links off a single URL. The URL created by URLBrief will cycle through the links you provide in order or at random, depending on the option you choose.
In this case we dropped in 4 different URLs that will be distributed evenly in order.
Now here is the really cool part! You can see who clicks on the links (IN REAL TIME!)
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Ghosty said...
It is cool .. although why I would want to send people to random URLs on a click is beyond me.
I'd only want to use this for tracking traffic to a promotional page on my on site or something. I wouldn't use this to link to other blogs and such, since it would rob those sites of Google PR and so forth.
Oct 8, 2007 6:42:49 PM
Amy said...
This is neat, although I'm a little confused on the multiple URL thing. How do I get to all the URLs besides the 1st one when I use the URL Brief?
Oct 8, 2007 7:25:24 PM
bloggishi said...
very useful for advertisers, they might (or must) use ppp's own URLBrief instead of tinyURL for their tracking images now. cool indeed.
Oct 8, 2007 7:48:31 PM
Jade said...
Lol Ted, see, I'm not the only one confused about the use of multiple urls!
Oct 8, 2007 11:21:38 PM
Daniel said...
I have a feeling most people will just use it as a one-to-one long url to short url conversion, but, here are some ideas for using multiple urls:
- Say you just polished your 1969 Mustang Mach 1 (I wish!!) and can't help but to post pictures of it on your blog. Of course, it's so beautiful, you've taken a half a dozen pics or so. Now, in your blog post about your baby, you can't decide which to use... well, set them up in URLBrief and we'll give you a URL that will swap them out for your readers! A reader returning another day may notice a different image than last time and we all know fresh content keeps people coming back.
- Here's another idea - Put a couple of your favorite posts from your blog into a single url... share these links with your other blogging buddies - "Here's a random post from..."
- Create a few different pages with your "thought of the day" and then one URLBrief link could randomly display those on your blog. Kind of like programming, without programming :)
It's a 'fun' feature and really took some creative thinking to do something so... _different_. Now it's your turn to be creative with it! I bet more than a few of your can come up with something really cool to do with this!
Or, you can just send me a '69 Mustang :)
Oct 9, 2007 1:52:56 AM
Andrew Davies said...
The multiple URL is clearly so multiple advertisers can pay for the same keywords. The link will send the user to one of the advertisers. Quite cool but obviously has a limited focus since its been designed for a specific function.
Oct 9, 2007 7:02:29 AM
VC Dan said...
I'm not so sure about specific funtion...
Another use of multiple URLs could be:
- Multiple landing pages for a single campaign, allowing advertiser to optimize for the best performing landing pages over time. As implemented, this would require optimization from opp to opp. If you could delete/change destination URLs on-the-fly, it would allow landing page optimization during the span of a given opp.
With change/delete function, URLBrief could also allow advertisers to update the destination of old links as their site or offers change -- particularly if promotions are time-specific (e.g. 50% off landing page for the next week, then general marketing landing page after 50% offer expires). The posts wouldn't need to change, but URLBrief would allow such ongoing flexibility...
Oct 9, 2007 11:43:58 PM