Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Et tu, bitly?

It's becoming almost a kind of PTSD with me. As soon as I see the words "welcome to the new [name of product or service]," I break into a cold sweat and start to shake. Those words invariably portend technical horrors of a Lovecraftian variety.

A few months back, I shifted from my long-time favorite link-shortening service, tinyURL, to bit.ly, mainly for one reason: The bit.ly extension for Chrome allowed me to right-click on any link and choose "shorten and copy to clipboard" sans fuss, muss or page-hopping.

This morning, I got a nasty surprise when I right-clicked on a link. Instead of "shorten and copy to clipboard," I was greeted by "save link to bitly."

When I hopped over to the bit.ly site, there it was: "Welcome to the new bitly."

Now instead of speedy, courteous link shortening with no guff, we get "bitmarks." A bookmarking service ... with the link-shortening function still hidden in there somewhere ("need the shortlink to one of your bitmarks? Click its i button") but for my purposes as distant as Mars.

Gah!

Back to TinyURL, which while not quite as sexy as old bitly, is far, far superior to new bitly at shortening URLs.

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