Comments on: Idea: preview service for URL shorteners

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:05:09 +0000

With the launch of Bitly Pro
http://blog.bit.ly/post/284009728/announcing-bit-ly-pro
we’re getting much closer to this:
“When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link. “

By: Pascal Van Hecke

Pascal Van Hecke — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:46:19 +0000

Had the same idea of implementing a simple URL-unshortener as an exercise on Google Appengine, never got around it.
As for the metadata part, I think http://www.oembed.com/ should get you a long way already?
(it doesn’t generate page descriptions nor thumbnails itself however – only if the site of origin has implemented an api for that)

By: Bart Claeys

Bart Claeys — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:18:17 +0000

You clearly didn’t use brizzly.com yet. That does exactly what you describe!