Adjix Closes Its Doors

URL shortening services are a gamble at best. I know it, and if the whole world doesn’t know it by now, then those people are fooling themselves.

While I detest URL shorteners for the most part, they serve their purpose only for the fact that Twitter truncates tweets that have long URLs.

When Twitter announced that they would begin wrapping all links with their own t.co shortening service, I was worried that they would kill off third party URL shorteners for good. Fortunately for us, we could still use them if we wanted, although they would be run through t.co on the back-end. This is a good thing for security, as Twitter struggles on a day-to-day basis with fighting malware and spam. I do understand why they do it, and the end user is obviously the prime concern.

Recently I switched to using bit.ly Pro — using my own custom short domain. For the better part of a year, I had been using Adjix, which was a lovely service.

A few days ago I tried to access my account, but the page was down. Naturally, the first thing I did was check their Twitter account to see if there was any service level announcement.

What I found, was this tweet:

Sorry, but Adjix had to be unexpected retired on New Years Eve 2012. Previous shortened links will continue to work indefinitely.

— Adjix (@Adjix) January 3, 2012

I can’t help but be a little bit sad, however, I am not at all upset or even surprised. I have yet to see any URL shortening service advertise some sort of compelling business model. The fact that there are still services like bit.ly who have somehow managed to rustle up venture capital funding is astounding.

For the foreseeable future, I will continue to use services like bit.ly. It would be nice if I could pay them a small monthly fee — at least to assuage my own conscience that I’m not a freeloader. When I see value in a service, I have no qualms about offering up my hard earned dollars for it. We simply can’t sustain our economy on sheer good will alone.

I would love to see someone start some sort of open source URL shortening project. We need a de-centralized service that isn’t just tied down to one companies servers that we have no control of. What exact pieces we need to make that work, I’ll let someone else come up with that. I would happily pay for that though. Perhaps a Kickstarter project is in order?