URL shorteners have been popping up by the dozen lately, or so it seems. Already established sites have been racing to release their own services, and some publishers have even started snapping up short domains to aid the sharing of their posts while retaining some brand recognition.
Now StumbleUpon is trying to get their foot in the URL shortening door with Su.pr. Their service includes basic statistics, like Bit.ly or Tr.im, but they provide a lot of other interesting functionality as well.
Su.pr integrates with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to compose a message, shorten any URLs you may have in it, and publish to the two sites with a single click. You can even schedule the postings to go up at a later date and time.
The service integrates with StumbleUpon. As their site says, “Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered.” Shortening a link with Su.pr puts it into the StumbleUpon system, which has proven itself to be a souce of quality traffic in fairly large quantities.
There’s a bookmarklet available, and an API, though there doesn’t seem to be any developer documentation quite yet. I look forward to having Su.pr integrate with desktop Twitter clients like Tweetie and Twhirl.
As if that wasn’t interesting enough, Josh Lowensohn of CNET’s Webware blog reports that:
Soon [Su.pr] will also let publishers use the shortening service while maintaining domain branding. So instead of using su.pr/XXX, I could set it up to use cnet.com/XXX. It will also be able to be inserted into your site’s code, so that each URL you link to is automatically shortened. It does this while maintaining a special domain re-direct that allows search engines to pick up on those source links, even though they’ve been shortened.
The service is currently invitation-only, as it only recently launched, but you can find codes in the Webware post and more may find their way into the major tech blogs soon. (Hopefully the site will make it’s public launch soon and eliminate the need for an invitation code…)
