WP.me — shorten your links
Check out this address:
If you visit it, you’ll end up right back here. The nice thing about it is that it’s a short link, about 70% smaller than the permalink for this post. URL shorteners are nothing new, Tiny URL has been around for 100 years, but WP.me is different in a few ways.
- WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
- Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
- These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
- It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
- The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
- WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.
I think a few of these points are worth following up on. While URL shorteners have had some incredible usage tied to the growth (and constraints) of Twitter, I question their sustainability as a business. This point was underscored a few days ago when a popular one, tr.im, announced they were going to shut down at the end of the year.
Their story had a happy ending in that someone came in and saved them, but it was hard not to think of what would have happened if all their links stopped redirecting one day: part of the web would go dark. I also worry that because shorteners are essentially open proxies of HTTP they’ll be exploited by spammers and malware distributors to the point where businesses, anti-phishing, and anti-virus services will be forced to block them.
WordPress links have the structure they do, which is longer, because they’re meant to be permanent and portable. (And of course friendly to search engines.) Even if you weren’t using WordPress, the links contain no arbitrary IDs or other platform-specific implementation cruft so they should be trivial to serve from any system, even if you don’t use WordPress in the future. But if all the links to you use a shorter version, that sort of defeats the point!
But as Dave Winer articulated, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a shortener ourselves, and here we are. 
People are already using it.
How can you use it?
There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasure.
If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.com, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.
Our thanks also go out to our friends at GoDaddy and in Montenegro for help with the domain.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:37 am
That’s great for twitter!
Mahalo from Hawaii!
August 14th, 2009 at 7:41 am
This utterly rocks! Will it be working its way into the self-hosted version?
August 14th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Yes, if you run the stats plugin.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:42 am
This is really great news for all of us who tweet!
August 14th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Another GREAT Move Matt!
August 14th, 2009 at 7:46 am
such a convenient feature! thank you WP for making our abode more pleasure. (:
August 14th, 2009 at 7:56 am
This is so cool and so well implemented on your end! Thank you!!!
August 14th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Sweet.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Wow, great! Bit.ly will get less traffic from me now
So what is WP.com going to be used for now (other than redirecting to WordPress.com)?
WordPress.com is amazing … you guys add great features all the time (WordPress.org too
). Thanks a million!
August 14th, 2009 at 8:06 am
That’s still a secret.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:08 am
This is so awesome, ty for doing this
August 14th, 2009 at 8:11 am
lovely jubbly.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Yeah, I already used it twice yesterday! That this will be permanent makes it more reliable than other services.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:31 am
u guys have saved the best for august eh? “_
August 14th, 2009 at 8:39 am
I loooooooove this! Usually, I’d post the url on Twitter, so that I’d get a short one. Now is easier. Thank you so much!
August 14th, 2009 at 8:45 am
I noticed this while editing some pages. Very useful feature!
August 14th, 2009 at 8:52 am
China has blocked *.wordpress.com also wp.me…..it means we can’t visit wp.me directly
August 14th, 2009 at 9:03 am
I take this as a birthday present. Thank you, guys
August 14th, 2009 at 9:07 am
twitteriffic!
August 14th, 2009 at 9:38 am
you make great additions !
thanks
August 14th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Tthe best thing about it is the [wp.me] part..Love it <333
August 14th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Excellent feature. I was toying with using TinyURL for some of my pages but then came across an interesting article in Ireland yesterday about how a lot of these services are going bust – it’s at http://www.amas.ie/blog/tiny-url-problems/
August 14th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Awesome new feature! Thanks.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:55 am
I noticed this update yesterday ! It’s awsome !
August 14th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Yay! I posted abt this just yesterday and moments later…this announcement was up
Thanks for this nifty feature.
As I understand it, we can use the shortlink for new posts only after they’re posted…or draft saved. Correct?
August 29th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Yes, that’s right
August 14th, 2009 at 11:03 am
I will continue to use twitterfeed to auto broadcast my latest blog entry to twitter and that’s set up to use bit.ly which still works great for now.
This is still a nice thing to have on the blog though.
August 14th, 2009 at 11:05 am
great , thank you matt
August 14th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I saw it yesterday and nearly fainted. I love WordPress more every day.
August 14th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Can we presume the next feature you are working on is to mimic twitterfeed and automatically feed new posts to sites like twitter, identica, facebook, etc? Or does this feature already exist somehow/somewhere?
if not – if there is anyone who wants to help me code a plugin leave me a msg – i can write the requirements/specs
August 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
That is indeed pretty darned spiffy. Thanks guys!
August 14th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
interesting and useful.
thanks!
August 14th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
now this is what i call innovation!
August 14th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
With URL shortening services becoming the new currency of the web, this is a great and timely move by you guys! Great stuff.
August 14th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Great idea. I am sure I will be using it.
August 14th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Well, another cool news from you guys, thank you again for your work ^^
August 14th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
The smaller the url the better,wordpress is getting better all the time.
August 14th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
This is awesome! I’d already begun using it before reading this article. It sure helps for folks receiving links on their phones or even remembering. This, among the other features, is great!
August 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I’m really liking this feature. Mad props!
August 14th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Great!
August 14th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Will you guys be rolling our bit.ly style analytics as well? That would rock. Great stuff team WP.
August 14th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
All the links go to your blog, which already has analytics. I think stats on the *redirect* level are dumb because they get hugely inflated by bots and such that the redirect service can’t tell the difference from regular people, versus stats on your blog that use Javascript to get the most accurate snapshot of your audience. (I know some people disagree with me here.)
August 14th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I made a post about it yesterday…
it’s really great and so useful, and the fact that the links are permanent is a huge help and even biger relief, thanks alot, it came just in time!
August 14th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Nice and must try it !!!
August 14th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
I just wonder, will that be as SEO friendly as permalink? Personally I do not like tiny url things.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Out of interest how did you manage to be the first two digit .me domain?
August 14th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Good karma.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
will be very usefull
August 14th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I even noticed it before you posted it
. That is a very great feature when we tweet (even though I don’t) and when you need to link to something else. Thanks
August 14th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
thanks
August 14th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I noticed this great new feature yesterday!! Thanks, WP! This will come in handy especially for when I use Twitter!
August 14th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Is it possible for me to have a customized short URL?
August 14th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Sort of, if the slug for your post is short it will use the slug instead of the auto-generated ID.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Fantastic – I’ve used it twice today already! Thanks, WP!
August 14th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
How to let visitor use the shorten URL ?
August 14th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Right now only if they use the “blog info” link I mentioned in the post, or if their client supports rel=shortlink.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
This is a fabulous extra for WordPress users. Thanks, thanks… and more thanks!
August 14th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I love WP. Seriously. And this just makes it better, as does every single new feature implemented.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Love this. Nice work!
How about a “tweet this” button in the editing dialogue? I find that I bump my traffic considerable when I tweet abut new posts. Could save a step….
August 14th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Great! This is why I will never leave WP…constant innovation!
August 14th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
tanks!
August 14th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Short links, short comment: Yay!
August 14th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
That’s nice!!!
August 14th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Very nice. I’m new to WP and I’m glad I took the advice of friends when I chose this place as home!
August 14th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
What Marv said.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Thats cool, brilliant news, many thanks!
August 14th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I put a lot of my links on Twitter when sharing my post but from now on if it is a post I will use this little but helpful tool to shorten my link. I have a feeling that WP will be around longer than twitter.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Really like this! Many of my short links are to my blog announcing new posts. Thanks.
Is there a way to use different shorteners so I can track where i’m posting to – like campaign tracking in a web analytics program?
tr.im can’t do this either so I can only track based on when people responded (assuming, not so accurately, that the latest post was what changed the stats)
August 14th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Do stats from wp.me links show up in the stats for WordPress.com hosted sites?
August 15th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Yes.
August 14th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
great extra!
August 14th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Short is sweet
August 14th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
This will be very useful, thanks for adding this! This will definitely help me write better Twitter posts!
August 14th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
me like
August 14th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Love it! Use it! Thanks WP!
August 14th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Try this at my twitter.
Oo.. Yeah..
August 14th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Nice, the web is a little bit less broken.
Did you think about using rev=”canonical” instead of rel=”shortlink” since it defining the reverse relationship i.e. define the relationship of the current document to the linked document.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:59 am
Check out the Microformats.org page I linked, it has some pretty good arguments why “rev” isn’t really proper in this situation, as it reverses the assertion relationship in a way that could be exploited.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Great. Already used it.
Now what about something like twitterfeed which automatically feeds posts to twitter. or a twitterit automatic link for posts on WordPress.com.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
That’s very helpful when linking people to posts via Twitter. Keep up the good work guys!
August 14th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Awesome idea. It would be nice to see twitter shortening our links with wp.me… Maybe you can go for a “partnership”?
August 15th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Yes! Great for twitter.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Very nice feature! The ‘list all post’ and this shortener are the best news of the year for the WP.com users.
PS: Can we put the short link at the end of every post, for everyone who wants to use it instead of the large one? Or there is another way to see it if you’re not a WP user?
Thanks!!
August 15th, 2009 at 2:35 am
Its nice. Thanks cause always make a wonderful this web.
August 15th, 2009 at 3:05 am
I cant find the links
When will you guys fix the errors while running spell check—the numbers get all jumbled up and spell check turns off by itself
Also, we need a good google search type of search facility–the current search doesn’t quite cut it
should be able to generate a table of contents for the entire blog
August 15th, 2009 at 3:46 am
That’s nice, and cool. Also for anything else than “twitter”, mind them
August 15th, 2009 at 4:41 am
What I’m waiting for, thanks
August 15th, 2009 at 6:10 am
this is just great!