Today we proudly announce our first web service, hur.lu (Hurl u). hur.lu is an URL Shortener that puts the focus on ease of use, simplicity and to some degree design. For people who don’t know what URL Shorteners are, it are small webservices that allow you to create a short URL for all your long URL’s and links to post them to eg. twitter where only 140 characters are allowed. But the short URL service can also be used as a small analytics service to check the amount of hits your link gets.
The hur.lu service was started last week on the 12th of March and in those 7 days we transformed a short URL we acquired into an almost fully functioning URL Shortener. The current set of features includes the basic URL shortener, an info bar with a most popular link and a last added links section, and a small but functional PHP API which allows most web apps and client apps to easily integrate the URL Shortening service. Within the next few says the amount of code examples for the API will be expanded and the support will be increased with eventually a “developers”-page, a bookmarklet to easily hurl links from within your browser, an info page and a simple section to retrieve data and statistics about a certain short-url like eg. amount of hits, visitor return rate, rank, date added, description and channel (web/API/app).
The service isn’t quite stable yet and hence has a beta tag, but it provides shorter URL’s than most services which on average means two extra characters you can use to tweet and it’s faster than most other services. You can find hur.lu at http://hur.lu/ of course.
hurly the ladybug, the mascot of hur.lu
