Make Your own TinyURL Service

On other fronts, we offer one approach on tinyurl "differentiation" via http://tinyarro.ws (super-small unicode URLs). For minimalists, we did http://ri.ms.

Not an overabundance of room nowadays to differentiate. But with TinyArrows, the concept is interesting enough to people that it has taken on a life of its own on Twitter, and we actually get a little traffic out of it to our other sites. But it's not enough traffic that I could recommend people spend much time on their own URL shrinkers (unless they're just bored and have a really compelling idea).

I suggest using the services as a feeder for leads for your other products-- I personally see the affiliate thing as a bit shady. The only cool place to do it is in those awful spam emails that spammers overload the URL shrinkers with to hide their target site-- you could steal their revenue. But then you're making money off of spam...

I'm don't think there's any room for differentiation left in the tinyurl space. There are literally hundreds of such services and some of them work without an UI altogether (see the firefox addon for http://is.gd).

Maybe, just maybe, you could set yourself apart by integrating tinypic, tinyurl and tinyvideo(?) or such into a neat package, and adding some whipcream features on top - but honestly, I'm very doubtful that there's any money in this.