Cli.gs is the latest player to
drop out of the competitive and unstable URL shortener market. On October 25, the service will stop accepting new URLs and stop running analytics on old ones. Cli.gs will release an export tool soon, so you won't lose your URLs entirely when they stop working. Cli.gs is also apparently up for sale, if anyone's looking to jump into a really unprofitable market. Even though this looks like a pretty clean shutdown, it raises some important questions about URL shortening as a business: it's something we all rely on, but it doesn't make any money on its own.
Tr.im learned the same lesson when it
closed down and then re-opened as an open source service, but there are still plenty of other URL shorteners out there in the same position as Cli.gs. Interestingly, Cli.gs is a member of 301Works, a collection of shortURL sites that teamed up with the goal of indexing all of their shortlinks, so that if a service went down, there would still be a way to see where its links used to go. Cli.gs is looking at the best way to use 301Works, but there's no plan yet.
Tags: 301works, cligs, tinyurl, url-shortener
