Conversation

Niche twitter thread time. I'm raising a glass to the end of the

's URL shortener gu.com, which is now on sale for £2.5 million. Back when twitter was only 140 chars & didn't shrink url links itself, making short URLs a whole important thing. 1/8

Rev Dan Catt

@revdancatt

Being a big important news org meant you didn't want to hand all your link shortening to a service like bit.ly - incase they turned around and held all your shortened links hostage. The trick of course was to own your own shortener. 2/8

5:04 PM · Sep 20, 2022

Replying to

It was around this time that I'd finished working at

@Flickr

& started working at the

@guardian

- my main involvement with both Flickr's & the G's urls shorteners was making sure the system used reduced the chances of spelling rude words! Although the odd c0ck slipped thru 3/8

Rev Dan Catt

@revdancatt

Sep 20, 2022

When I started at the

@guardian

there was a lot of consternation about the future of newspapers and I once joked that their two letter .com domain could become their most valuable asset. There are of course only 676 two letter (a-z) .com domain names in existence. 4/8

An aside

had a BBS called Illuminati Online with it's own exciting internet history (theregister.com/2011/06/10/io_) & at one point the io.com domain, allowing me to have an io dot com email address. A great 2 letter domain, I was sad when they lost it. 5/8

Rev Dan Catt

@revdancatt

Sep 20, 2022

Anyway, just over 12 years ago the

@guardian

started using gu.com as their own shortener, shortening literally thousands of urls - all of which are now broken, but c'est la vie. 6/8

Rev Dan Catt

@revdancatt

Sep 20, 2022

However times move on, twitter shortens URLs for you and .com addresses are becoming less important. One could argue that urls themselves are becoming less important. So it makes sense that gu.com should be released back into the wild (for £2.5m) 7/8

So thank you

and gu.com for all the good times, and making sure you absolutely could not accidentally spell 'fuck' or worse, U were amazing. 🍻 8/8