We do plan on creating an API that will allow users to create links, and view links through integrations, but it isn’t built currently. That’s an interesting solution for resolution, but I can definitely see the utility in having the resolution be in a lamda function, to ensure reliability. We don’t have a daily export function, but can provide links to companies in the rare event that something happens to us.
It depends on each company, for example let’s say you have a link to a holiday party, you can create go/holidayparty and update that every year to the new page, or use go/holidayparty2019, go/holidayparty2020, ideally, you could update the links so that they are more relevant to the current time that they are being used.
Thanks! The functionality is definitely powerful at large scales. We want to provide a solution that companies can get started with right away, with zero setup.
That's great! More companies need a solution like the one you've created, unfortunately, not everyone knows how to build one. There needs to be an easy way to access important links. Some companies will even save a Google Doc with a list of all the important links, which isn't scalable long term. We're hoping we can make that process even easier so that even non-technical employees can create links.
Outages are definitely a risk every company encounters. Whether it's a third-party hosted solution or an internal solution, unfortunately, servers do go down. We run all our services on AWS which provides an uptime SLA of at least 99.99%, so uptime shouldn't be a problem, but we do recognize the concern.
It's all about building trust with the company. We don't store or read any information on the sites you visit, we just redirect URLs that contain "go" as the domain, and provide a link for any "go/" links in your browser. We would never risk compromising that trust.
If you take a look at a company like Grammarly, they've built trust with their users, which is why they can have the "Read and modify all data on all sites" and still have 10 million customers. We plan to build the same trust with our customers.
Pricing is always a tough thing to get right. If you look at Shopify's pricing page on the internet archive, you can see it changes almost every week since 2012, so it's something that all companies struggle with getting right. We're always open to feedback from customers.
For the analytics, this is a trend I've personally seen in SaaS products lately, where companies can get in-depth analytics on how their team members are working. If you look at Github, Jira, or Google Docs, you can see personal stats for user events. Even Slack is starting to send out the number of private vs public messages sent throughout the week. It's something that definitely needs to be discussed because I can see it being used for good or being used for bad (as in micromanagement). Google Docs is the only one I know of that gives the option to opt out of usage analytics, so that's a great suggestion for a feature.
These are all great questions. Security is definitely our number one priority, especially since most of our customers are large enterprises. In order to create a link, you must first authenticate with your company's Single Sign-on solution to access the dashboard. If a user cannot properly be authenticated through Okta, GSuite, or another SSO, then that user cannot use the shortened link and cannot access the knowledge base of links. Second, all of the destinations can be audited in the dashboard, and we're currently testing solutions for checking the safety of a link that users can redirect to. This is unique to a golink system since the company can set these policies up for its users. For example, as an admin, you can disallow "http" links and force all links to use "https" to increase the security of the links. Now the company has control over which links are allowed to be used. The memorable link portion is also an added benefit of implementing a golink system.
Stay tuned, we're working on creating a more granular permissions policy as this is a concern for many users. We can promise you that we don't store or read any information on the sites you visit, but of course it would make users feel more comfortable if they could read it themselves in the permissions when installing.
Specifically, it's to resolve any go links that exist in your browser, but we plan to explore the partial permissions options to have the user choose if they want this feature enabled or not. This way you could install the extension and have the golink redirection option without the "reading all data" permission.
We're still experimenting with our ad strategy, but one of our target markets are previous employees of companies who have used to have a go link system. It just happen to spread to current employees that use a go link system, probably through word of mouth.
We have a mobile application on the product roadmap, so stay tuned!
For our business model, we’re focusing on making GoLinks integrate with all the great applications that you use everyday. We’re currently available in the Slack marketplace, and Okta, but soon to be in Attlasian’s marketplace, with more integrations in the way. The more integrations we can incorporate, the stronger the business.
Yep, It’s in our terms of service, in the unlikely case something happens to GoLinks, we will provide you with all your links. But we plan on being around for a long time.
You pretty much just listed out our current backlog. Great minds think a like! For the first item though, we plan to implement “tags”. The sub directory format actually causes links to be siloed under a specific subname, so if 2 links should exist across 2 sub directories, it would need to be duplicated. With tags, you can tag the link and aggregate the links with the tag.
For the 4th point about someone using another link redirect, that's an interesting use case. Should we change the link to the underlying link, removing the intermediate links, or treat it as its own links? I can see a user doing this to try and create their own analytics, or maybe they found it easier to copy an already shortened link. That's a great suggestion, and we'll look into that use case.
Yep! This is a problem we've addressed by making everyone in the organization an owner. If a link breaks, anyone in the organization can change it, even if the original creator leaves the company. Checkout out our blog to learn more about the history of go links, you may see why the "go" term is so popular.
It's less of a link shortener and more of a link manager for companies. The concern that companies have with URL shorteners is they can't manage who is creating these links, and who owns these links. With GoLinks, the company will own the links, they can manage, edit, update, delete any links within the organization, so they will be centralized. The added benefit is that with a memorable link, you can access go/benefits much easier than bit.ly/fE7r232r. URL shorteners aim to shorten links, Golinks aims to make links memorable.
Yep, that's correct! That works assuming you have access to setup subdomains for contoso.com. We make it easy for any employee, technical and non-technical, to update and create links.
Always happy to see go links being used at other companies! You can actually take this a step further at Eligrey. By setting up a DNS Entry that redirects go.eligrey.com to the domain go you would then allow your links to become conversational and even quicker to access. For example you could say "Checkout go slash zerodrop" without physically sending an email or message.
This is definitely a real concern, and we're actually exploring the Chrome permissions to see if it's possible to redirect your traffic, without requiring the "Read all data" permission, because you're right, that shouldn't be the norm.
To address the first concern, anyone in the company can modify any link, so they will never go stale. We do this to solve that exact problem where documentation may contain dead links. With GoLinks your links will always be up to date as long as people are using them. Your company is the owner of the links, not an individual.
The second, our links are actually more human-parsable. go/customer-feedback is much more readable than https://docs.google.com/d/document/ABCDE1234/. You actually wouldn't know if the google doc is relevant without opening it.
This might be surprising, but many companies with a similar system actually don't maintain them very well. It works the first time when a tools team builds it, but when those engineers leave the company, new engineers will either try to revive the old system, or rewrite the entire system from scratch to maintain it. We continue to improve the product over time with customer feedback and can provide analytics for the most common links used in the company.
There currently isn't a solution specifically solving these issue on the market today.
Awesome work! We love to see go link enthusiasts!
There are a ton of good open source golinks systems out there, we just want to give users a full suite of golinks with zero setup :)
Great question, and it’s a common question we get a lot. Bit.ly allows you to shorten links in marketing campaigns, and is meant for public use. GoLinks is used to make links memorable and conversational and is private, so it can only be used within your company.
I have been searching and waiting for someone to build this! Thank you so much! Currently reviewing code is a guessing game. "Does it actually do what it's supposed to do? I don't know but the code looks sound." I have only the code to reference and maybe screen shots if they're provided. I'm not going to spend the time to download the diff and deploy it myself just to see if the application is doing what it's supposed to.