Public shortening via urlShort at u.mavrev.com discontinued

After some time with reliability issues this year, I've decided to discontinue public shortening of URLs via our urlShort service at u.mavrev.com.

Why? First and foremost, if we can not offer short URLs with the absolute best uptime and reliability, I don't believe we should offer it. Secondarily, it is my belief that having third parties shorten links is a bad idea to begin with (I wrote in depth about this last year), and with the ability for anyone to run their own urlShort service by taking the simple and easy to install open source code from the urlShort Project there is no reason to offer what would be a sometimes unreliable service.

For the foreseeable future, urlShort at u.mavrev.com will not accept new short URLs to be created, through our web, mobile, bookmarklet, extension, or API interfaces. If we can offer such a service reliably again, we will, as in the time that it was publicly available nearly 3 million URLs were shortened, and a peak of 6.5 URL redirects handled per month.

We encourage content publishers to utilize urlShort to create and maintain their own short URL service, and to help restore reliability and transparency to short URLs used on social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.

For questions, comments, or concerns please contact me at matt@mavrev.com.