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 15th, 2009 at 6:20 am
awesome, great, smart
love wp
August 15th, 2009 at 7:27 am
yep…….
great for twitter
August 15th, 2009 at 8:44 am
That’s absolutely great for those who have blogs on WordPress. But what about those of us who have WordPress platforms hosted on our own servers? Will we get access to this wonderful feature in the future?
September 28th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Indeed, if you use the stats plugin: see http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/shorten/#comment-70071
August 15th, 2009 at 8:52 am
hmm, we can take backlinks directly with our tweets
August 15th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Good
thank you WP
August 15th, 2009 at 11:48 am
How would we use this in a self-hosted version? Please?
August 15th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
sounds interesting.
August 15th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
What?! I need blogging for dummies. I’m about 30 tutorials away from understanding what I just read.
August 29th, 2009 at 9:24 am
To learn more about url shortening, you may want to check out this Wikipedia page on the subject
August 15th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I suppose, since you’re managing your own wp.me service, the referrer stats on my wordpress.com would be the actual referrer location where my wp.me link is shown (twitter, other blogs, etc.) That is, my referrer stat will *not* contain wp.me. Did I get this right?
August 15th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Thanks a bunch for this!!! Can you also rename the short link: http://wp.me/%5BRENAME%5D? If not will this be possible in the future?
August 29th, 2009 at 10:00 am
If the slug for your post is short, it will use the slug instead of the auto-generated ID.
August 15th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
the domain portion is short but the rest of the url is not really short, why is that?
August 29th, 2009 at 9:59 am
This is to make sure there are enough unique links for all posts on all blogs hosted on WordPress.com
If the slug for your post is short it will use the slug instead of the auto-generated ID.
August 15th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
thanks, this is good, but I was not given the impression that decreases the weight load of the post when you probe.
Matt greetings. wordpress and the community as well.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Popping in to confirm my gratitude for this great new feature! Keep up the good news wordpress.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Great feature. Would love it if you guys at wordpress could integrate a twitter feed, without having to use an extrernal ap which converts to bit.ly as default when posting to twitter.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
I often like your new features, but what will this help a NON-twitterer?
August 27th, 2009 at 8:20 am
The shortlink will come in handy any time you want to send along links via IM or email, for example, that would otherwise appear bulky. I’ll bet you can come up with more uses, too!
August 15th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Awesome! Now I do not have to go through a external shortener for twitter!
August 15th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Matt, to be clear, no one “rescued” Tr.im. Tr.im backed off a horrible business decision that would make them an unattractive acquisition. So, they re-framed their position saying that they would keep it around. They did not promise anything in terms of additional innovation or product buildout, but they did promise the links would stay active. Bit.ly tried to rescue them and apparently others did as well, but Tr’im’s asking price is too high for what they have.
Just need to point that out.
Well done on the WP.me.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
This is pretty tubular.
August 16th, 2009 at 12:12 am
This is so great, and am also a Twitter user.
August 16th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Perfect! No more visiting tiny url for me to get my short links!
August 16th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Twitter bar does not mind it, but is a good thing.
August 16th, 2009 at 3:31 am
Very helpful. Thanks Matt.
August 16th, 2009 at 4:18 am
Great. You got rid of one middle-man. Now how about the other one, Twitter, by introducing easy microblogging with RSS?
August 16th, 2009 at 4:23 am
Have used it a few times already. Good stuff.
Echo the same comment re bit.ly as I won’t be using them as much now. Plus Flickr didn’t like bit.ly stuff already.
August 16th, 2009 at 5:45 am
cute!
August 16th, 2009 at 6:22 am
wow…, nice and very helpfull…
August 16th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Great, I thought you would be doing that with wp.com ; I am eagerly waiting for wp.com utility, WordPress is always impressive! And thanks for extending it to self hosted version too!
Destination Infinity
August 16th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Coool. Great. Thaks a lot.
August 16th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Wow, perfect for linking inside your own entries! Thanks!
August 16th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
That’s awesome, thanks!
August 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Nice.
I wana change my shortlink for homepage(given by worpress.com) into my own choice..
Is it possible?
August 29th, 2009 at 1:41 am
No, I’m sorry you can’t customize the shortlinks. They are created automatically.
August 16th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Thanks for sharing this. Very helpful and applicable.
August 16th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Totally great for using on twitter
Very good change!
August 16th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Just in time for Twitter links
Thanks
August 16th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
That’s so original, I love it.
August 16th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
This is a great feature to add to WordPress, especially as you have chosen to advertise the links using rel=shortlink.
Sam
August 16th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Excellent – thanks!
And how about adding short-links to comments as well (in “Edit Comment” section)?
August 16th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Wow! thanks so much for sharing! Definitely using this to my advantage.
August 16th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Definitely Cool!! Thanks for knowing what we need before We know it! Great!!!!
August 16th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
This is perfect! Often my permalinks are long enough that the post title is truncated, meaning I have to copy and paste the first and second half of the link separately when referencing a post or Tweeting.
I love the simple one-click! Thanks!
August 17th, 2009 at 2:11 am
nice
August 17th, 2009 at 2:17 am
Nice!
August 17th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Dang, you’re brilliant.
August 17th, 2009 at 4:07 am
Great feature Matt!
When will I be able to Tweet my WordPress posts directly to Twitter?
October 1st, 2009 at 10:30 am
We’re listening carefully to these requests, and working to meet them
August 17th, 2009 at 6:12 am
It’s ROCK, dude..!! Good job
August 17th, 2009 at 7:52 am
are search engines still recoqnize this shortened link?
August 17th, 2009 at 8:33 am
I would like to echo Ken’s question. Is there something in the works to replace Twitterfeed for WordPress.com users? I would *immediately* take advantage of the short URLs if they can autopost to my Twitter account. Thanks for your reply.
October 19th, 2009 at 2:09 am
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/publicize-twitter/
August 17th, 2009 at 10:33 am
What’s the SEO impact, specifically? Does the shortlink to a post count as a Different link than the permalink? I suppose it doesn’t matter if I only use it in Twitter, but what if I use it elsewhere?