ThingyURL.com is a new URL redirection service with a difference.  Traditionally, URL redirection services such as Tinyurl™ and Shorturl™ work by automatically generated ids.  As their popularity has grown so has the size of the ids, so it’s not uncommon to get a URL redirection with an array of meaningless letters and numbers e.g. f45e0zh.

The main aim of URL redirection is to shorten very long website addresses – particularly articled sites,  where you find a URL can be peppered with unusual characters like &?%$!, and replace it with a shorter and hopefully easier to remember URL. 

e.g.

http://thingyurl.com/buyelectricals

Replaces

http://www.electrical123.com

The idea of URL redirection is that you can refer to particularly interesting site pages in blogs, articles and emails and pass it on to others more easily.  The trouble is that the URL may well be shorter but it isn’t particularly memorable.

The other benefit is for affiliate users.  Affiliates generate revenue by linking to ecommerce sites and receive a percentage or reward for a sale.  They are recognised by the affiliate site with a unique id in the URL but quite often the nature of the URL is a dead giveaway that it is an affiliate link. This is seen by affiliates as a negative factor because it can put off a potential customer from following the link.  URL redirection provides the opportunity to hide the affiliate nature of the link but as with shorter URLs, it doesn’t replace it with anything that is particularly meaningful.

 ThingyURL.com provides the ability to create automatically generated ids – just like all the other URL redirection services.  However, the main purpose for creating ThingyURL.com was to allow users the ability to specify their own names which actually mean something to them e.g. their own name, company name, friendly user /screen name or simply a name that is related to the site that they want to link to.

e.g.

http://thingyurl.com/news
http://thingyurl.com/sport
http://thingyurl.com/steven
http://thingyurl.com/microsoft

These names (e.g. news, sport, steven, microsoft™) are referred to as aliases.

When we developed the site, we wondered whether we could improve on this scheme some more.  So we came up with the idea of extending the aliases so that we could have sub-aliases.

e.g.

http://thingyurl.com/steven/wiki
http://thingyurl.com/steven/professor
http://thingyurl.com/steven/seagal

By doing this one can create a catalogue of related pages which all start with the same alias.  These URLs are generally shorter but importantly they are very memorable – so much so that you can pass them on to others verbally. 

Affiliate users can create names which refer to what it is they are selling e.g. http://thingyurl.com/mp3players/ipod

Aliases and Sub-Aliases are free with adverts on ThingyURL.com. A small charge can be paid to remove the advertising.

I hope you pay us a visit a see our new kind of URL Redirection.

Thanks for reading about us!

Simon Burgess
Owner & Creator of http://ThingyURL.com
Creating memorable URLs