I’ve finally opened a Twitter account, so you can follow me at http://twitter.com/ardamis. As a social experiment, it’s interesting to watch and discuss, but I haven’t really participated much. On the other hand, I’m very interested in the phenomenon of URL shortening. So, without too much trouble, I put together yet another URL shortening service: Minifi.de (‘minified’, in the jargon). It does pretty much the same thing as tinyurl.com, bit.ly and is.gd – you enter a long URL and it returns a shorter one. I’m about 50% done with the API (it works, so long as the URL valid), so if anyone knows of any clients that allow the user to specify a shortening service, I’d like to test that functionality. I have plans to make it account-based, so that you can track usage statistics and such, but that will only happen after I’m confident that the thing will survive in the wild.

So, feel free to give it a whirl, but know that it’s still in development and that I’ll probably have to wipe the database a few more times before I get it just right.