Whole History of Url - Short URL - History
What is a URL?
A URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and was coined in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, known as the inventor of the World Wide Web – A pretty big claim to fame I’d say.
Tim had big dreams about the WWW and it’s interesting to take note of and compare it to what is happening today:
"The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. "
Keeping it simple though, a URL is basically a web address.
But, it has also become one of our most valuable online sharing tools.
The Entire History of URL Shorteners Infographic
In case you don’t want the full story, we created a little infographic here to give you a breakdown of what’s been quietly going on over the last 20+ years:
The Beginning of the URL Shortener
So where did this URL shortening all begin?
From the launch of the world wide web in 1991, the digital world grew quickly.
People were using the internet more and more, getting comfortable in this virtual space. And as digital users evolved over time, the URL evolved along with it.
One particular user, a 24-year-old American web developer, was about to start something big.
All this user wanted to do, was to be able to convert postings on unicycling newsgroups into Web pages, without having to deal with long, cumbersome URLs. He had run into this problem, and just wanted to make his life easier with shorter ones.
And so, Kevin Gilbertson, known by his friends as Gilby, created the first URL shortener, TinyURL, in 2002.
Gilby didn’t have any particularly big plans for TinyURL either. He just wanted to solve this problem, and improve his user experience. I’m almost certain that he had no idea that he was kicking off the soon-to-be rapidly evolving industry of URL shortening.
“It’s a good, simple idea and it’s useful for a lot of people,” he said in a interview with Wired in 2004.
So true Gilby, so true.
Founder of TinyURL Kevin Gilbertson
Bitly Introduces Branded Short Domains
In January 2010, Bit.ly launched Branded Short Domains, giving brands the ability to control their brand and capture their data by replacing the “Bit.ly” in their Bitlinks with their own custom domains. Although it wasn’t the simplest process, especially for non-techies, it was still an important milestone for the URL shorteners evolution (and a founding principle of our company).
From there, Bitly continued to grow (thanks to exposure and traffic from Twitter of course), and in April 2010, Bit.ly launched it’s Bitly Brand Tools (formerly known as Bitly Enterprise).
Bitly Enterprise Dashboard in 2010:
Now you could shorten, brand and track your links, monitoring them on your multiple channels and start to optimize your marketing efforts with valuable data.
Credit: Rebrandly
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