Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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Hi - a few things...

First, URL shortening is not what this tool is for.

It will function as a URL shortener if you put in a URL and tell it to, but again - that's not what it was built for.

Second, I tend to agree with the notion that URL shorteners are "bad for the web". So, since we happen to have a (secondary) URL shortening function, I did two things:

1. Made a commitment with actual resources to keep 0x.co running forever.[1]

2. Had a short discussion with my friend Jason Scott[2][3] about giving Internet Archive and Archive Team an easy port for download/archiving. In our conversation he reiterated his (well known) position that URL shorteners are bad in general, but less terrible if there is a published (and maintained) spec for data exfiltration.

But again ... URL shortening is NOT what this tool is for.

[1] simple, lightweight pages combined with massive, leftover rsync.net bandwidth/hosting resources make this trivial.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott

[3] http://ascii.textfiles.com/

Yes, this is not a URL shortener per se, although it can obviously be used as such.

Sad story, but I worked for a company named Netword exactly two decades ago that was going to do this in a big way, even got one of the major SV investment firms, Hambrecht & Quist, very interested (and their in with Netscape, who they helped take public, would have been important), as in, we launched, and they came to us....

But it was killed by devil investors who due to previous resource misallocations and bad risk management (MPV, MPV, MVP!!!) had gotten their hooks into the company about the time I started there. Weird and nasty denouncement, 13 of us resigned in masse one day from our lawyer's office, we had to fight to get our last paychecks (something state government enforcement agencies have no humor about at all), etc. etc.

It a very good idea, I think, and who knows, maybe it's time has come. Mr. rsync (who I'm a very happy customer of (http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ )), you're welcome to drop me an email check my info) for what we figured out in that effort.

Note that we were going to do "Networds(TM)", as in "Intel annual report", obviously one thing that made this less important was the increasing quality of search engines. This isn't quite the same thing....

First of all, thanks for being our customer (at rsync.net, that is).

Yes, I'll email to hear your story - it would be interesting.

I think the key to what I'm trying to do here is keeping the product, and the interface, extremely stripped down and simple - which causes costs to drop dramatically (in terms of hosting, bandwidth, server costs, etc.).

Not having any advertisements or tracking or third party hooks, etc., makes that much easier - and makes for a much nicer product. The revenue model is selling custom codes, so you are not the product. The codes are.

The revenue model is selling custom codes, so you are not the product. The codes are.

That, BTW, was the business model of Netword, and in those gold rush days it worked very well. Today, resources are so cheap it ought to work as well, even if it doesn't really take off.

And you're welcome, and again, thanks for saving my email etc. from a tornado....

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