Once upon a time not very long ago, the link shortening business appeared to be the tech world’s next golden egg. Site’s like TinyURL and Bitly were able to build fully-realized business models by condensing links down to more manageable Twitter lengths of roughly 20 characters long.
At least 10,000 Twitter users fell for a scam that spread like wildfire across the social networking site early today.
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jerry Brito, a policy wonk and web developer based in Washington, D.C.
Gone are the days when spreading the word about a new band meant handing out homemade CDs. With the growing importance of social media marketing in the music world, bln.kr wants to help emerging and amateur bands share their tracks and manage their social media profiles.
Due to a tidal wave of spam-filled links from Bit.ly’s j.mp URL shortener, Facebook has temporarily blocked the links from the site. “As part of our effort to keep Facebook and the people who use our service secure, we closely monitor the content shared on the site for spam and malicious content,” Facebook said of [...]
Who would have thunk that .ly was actually the top-level domain code for the Libyan government, just like .ca for Canada and .us for the United States? Probably not the creators of bit.ly, owl.ly, smel.ly and other .ly URL shorteners that are out there.
Looks like Google has updated its hit list.
