Just when you thought that the great shortener wars of 2009 had come to an uneasy calm, we may have just uncovered a new, yet unlaunched competitor that wants to upset everything.
In Firefox, point your address bar to: http://to./ (UPDATE – works on the latest Chrome dev build). What you see is this:
Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, brought this to our attention. What this appears to be, is a use of the .to top level domain. So instead of http://bit.ly, they have built http://.ly.
This would mean that “TO. – Get Shorty URL” (for lack of a better name) would indeed be the shortest URL shortener, not just in the world, but possible. We are very curious. More after the jump.
The web page says that we should “know who to contact,” but we don’t. If you do, or you are that person: alex.w@thenextweb.com is waiting. What do you guys think? Best domain name ever, or just a clever ploy far too late to the game?
Darren’s Explanation (via Twitter to me):
@alex It would be the shortest possible URL shortener.
@dbounds: could you not have http://t./ ?
@alex I don’t believe so. I believe they’re hosting this out of .to. Meaning that ‘.to’ is the top level domain name.
@alex So where as people have like bit.ly, or in your example i.ly, these guys have .to.
@alex The period at the end is necessary to tell the browser that it’s at the top level. e.g.: http://www.google.com./
@alex Otherwise browsers will try to resolve it to http://to.com/
Wow! Thanks!
btw, it does work in Google Chrome dev-channel…
It works in Google Chrome on Mac :).
It works in my Chrome 4.0.249.25
Hey! This is just an experimental redirector, not intended for public use (yet).
It works in FF…
Yeah, works in chrome!
at last, 3.ly is the shortest!
It works in Safari 4.0.4 on Mac OS X, and even without the terminating dot, so “http://to/” is fine.
In Chrome dev-channel it seems to work even if you type just ‘to’ and hit enter.
if you look up at what ip that site is based, and go directly to that ip, you get to another site with a name, wouldnt that be the owner?
It seems not quite user-friendly. I doubt its viability.
Aparently you can use this by just going to http://to./{URL to shorten}
“to” is top level domain of Tonga
According to Wikipedia: “Recently, the TLD itself has started to host a website, the to. URL shortening service.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.to
This is the owned by Government of the Kingdom of Tonga
http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=whois&host=to
Then is not an automatic translation of to.com (not exist), you can check than by tapping in command line “ping to”, like “ping google.com”
There is new site which short your url using more than 10 services once,he called http://www.shortesturl.net
Enjoy
That isn’t always the case. If they have a shared ip web host, it is very possible that going directly to the IP might just go to one of the sites, not the one we are looking for.