WP.me — shorten your links
Check out this address:
If you visit it, you’ll end up right back here. The nice thing about it is that it’s a short link, about 70% smaller than the permalink for this post. URL shorteners are nothing new, Tiny URL has been around for 100 years, but WP.me is different in a few ways.
- WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
- Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
- These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
- It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
- The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
- WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.
I think a few of these points are worth following up on. While URL shorteners have had some incredible usage tied to the growth (and constraints) of Twitter, I question their sustainability as a business. This point was underscored a few days ago when a popular one, tr.im, announced they were going to shut down at the end of the year.
Their story had a happy ending in that someone came in and saved them, but it was hard not to think of what would have happened if all their links stopped redirecting one day: part of the web would go dark. I also worry that because shorteners are essentially open proxies of HTTP they’ll be exploited by spammers and malware distributors to the point where businesses, anti-phishing, and anti-virus services will be forced to block them.
WordPress links have the structure they do, which is longer, because they’re meant to be permanent and portable. (And of course friendly to search engines.) Even if you weren’t using WordPress, the links contain no arbitrary IDs or other platform-specific implementation cruft so they should be trivial to serve from any system, even if you don’t use WordPress in the future. But if all the links to you use a shorter version, that sort of defeats the point!
But as Dave Winer articulated, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a shortener ourselves, and here we are. 🙂 People are already using it.
How can you use it?
There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasure.
If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.com, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.
Our thanks also go out to our friends at GoDaddy and in Montenegro for help with the domain.
WordPress.com News 
That’s great for twitter!
Mahalo from Hawaii!
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This utterly rocks! Will it be working its way into the self-hosted version?
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Yes, if you run the stats plugin.
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This is really great news for all of us who tweet!
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Another GREAT Move Matt!
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such a convenient feature! thank you WP for making our abode more pleasure. (:
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This is so cool and so well implemented on your end! Thank you!!! 🙂
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Sweet.
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Wow, great! Bit.ly will get less traffic from me now 😉
So what is WP.com going to be used for now (other than redirecting to WordPress.com)?
WordPress.com is amazing … you guys add great features all the time (WordPress.org too 😀 ). Thanks a million!
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That’s still a secret.
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This is so awesome, ty for doing this 😀
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lovely jubbly.
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Yeah, I already used it twice yesterday! That this will be permanent makes it more reliable than other services. 😀
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u guys have saved the best for august eh? “_
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I loooooooove this! Usually, I’d post the url on Twitter, so that I’d get a short one. Now is easier. Thank you so much! 😀
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I noticed this while editing some pages. Very useful feature!
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China has blocked *.wordpress.com also wp.me…..it means we can’t visit wp.me directly
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I take this as a birthday present. Thank you, guys
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twitteriffic!
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you make great additions !
thanks
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Tthe best thing about it is the [wp.me] part..Love it <333
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Excellent feature. I was toying with using TinyURL for some of my pages but then came across an interesting article in Ireland yesterday about how a lot of these services are going bust – it’s at http://www.amas.ie/blog/tiny-url-problems/
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Awesome new feature! Thanks.
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I noticed this update yesterday ! It’s awsome !
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Yay! I posted abt this just yesterday and moments later…this announcement was up 😛
Thanks for this nifty feature.
As I understand it, we can use the shortlink for new posts only after they’re posted…or draft saved. Correct?
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Yes, that’s right 🙂
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I will continue to use twitterfeed to auto broadcast my latest blog entry to twitter and that’s set up to use bit.ly which still works great for now.
This is still a nice thing to have on the blog though.
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great , thank you matt
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I saw it yesterday and nearly fainted. I love WordPress more every day.
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Can we presume the next feature you are working on is to mimic twitterfeed and automatically feed new posts to sites like twitter, identica, facebook, etc? Or does this feature already exist somehow/somewhere?
if not – if there is anyone who wants to help me code a plugin leave me a msg – i can write the requirements/specs
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That is indeed pretty darned spiffy. Thanks guys!
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interesting and useful.
thanks!
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now this is what i call innovation!
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With URL shortening services becoming the new currency of the web, this is a great and timely move by you guys! Great stuff.
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Great idea. I am sure I will be using it.
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Well, another cool news from you guys, thank you again for your work ^^
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The smaller the url the better,wordpress is getting better all the time.
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This is awesome! I’d already begun using it before reading this article. It sure helps for folks receiving links on their phones or even remembering. This, among the other features, is great!
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I’m really liking this feature. Mad props!
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Great!
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Will you guys be rolling our bit.ly style analytics as well? That would rock. Great stuff team WP.
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All the links go to your blog, which already has analytics. I think stats on the *redirect* level are dumb because they get hugely inflated by bots and such that the redirect service can’t tell the difference from regular people, versus stats on your blog that use Javascript to get the most accurate snapshot of your audience. (I know some people disagree with me here.)
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I made a post about it yesterday…
it’s really great and so useful, and the fact that the links are permanent is a huge help and even biger relief, thanks alot, it came just in time! 🙂
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Nice and must try it !!!
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I just wonder, will that be as SEO friendly as permalink? Personally I do not like tiny url things.
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Out of interest how did you manage to be the first two digit .me domain?
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Good karma. 🙂
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will be very usefull
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I even noticed it before you posted it 😀 . That is a very great feature when we tweet (even though I don’t) and when you need to link to something else. Thanks
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thanks
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I noticed this great new feature yesterday!! Thanks, WP! This will come in handy especially for when I use Twitter!
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Is it possible for me to have a customized short URL?
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Sort of, if the slug for your post is short it will use the slug instead of the auto-generated ID.
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Fantastic – I’ve used it twice today already! Thanks, WP!
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How to let visitor use the shorten URL ?
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Right now only if they use the “blog info” link I mentioned in the post, or if their client supports rel=shortlink.
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This is a fabulous extra for WordPress users. Thanks, thanks… and more thanks!
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I love WP. Seriously. And this just makes it better, as does every single new feature implemented.
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Love this. Nice work!
How about a “tweet this” button in the editing dialogue? I find that I bump my traffic considerable when I tweet abut new posts. Could save a step….
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Great! This is why I will never leave WP…constant innovation! 🙂
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tanks!
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Short links, short comment: Yay!
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That’s nice!!! 🙂
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Very nice. I’m new to WP and I’m glad I took the advice of friends when I chose this place as home!
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What Marv said.
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Thats cool, brilliant news, many thanks!
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I put a lot of my links on Twitter when sharing my post but from now on if it is a post I will use this little but helpful tool to shorten my link. I have a feeling that WP will be around longer than twitter.
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Really like this! Many of my short links are to my blog announcing new posts. Thanks.
Is there a way to use different shorteners so I can track where i’m posting to – like campaign tracking in a web analytics program?
tr.im can’t do this either so I can only track based on when people responded (assuming, not so accurately, that the latest post was what changed the stats)
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Do stats from wp.me links show up in the stats for WordPress.com hosted sites?
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Yes.
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great extra!
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Short is sweet
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This will be very useful, thanks for adding this! This will definitely help me write better Twitter posts!
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me like
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Love it! Use it! Thanks WP!
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Try this at my twitter.
Oo.. Yeah..
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Nice, the web is a little bit less broken.
Did you think about using rev=”canonical” instead of rel=”shortlink” since it defining the reverse relationship i.e. define the relationship of the current document to the linked document.
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Check out the Microformats.org page I linked, it has some pretty good arguments why “rev” isn’t really proper in this situation, as it reverses the assertion relationship in a way that could be exploited.
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Great. Already used it.
Now what about something like twitterfeed which automatically feeds posts to twitter. or a twitterit automatic link for posts on WordPress.com.
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That’s very helpful when linking people to posts via Twitter. Keep up the good work guys!
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Awesome idea. It would be nice to see twitter shortening our links with wp.me… Maybe you can go for a “partnership”? 😛
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Yes! Great for twitter.
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Very nice feature! The ‘list all post’ and this shortener are the best news of the year for the WP.com users.
PS: Can we put the short link at the end of every post, for everyone who wants to use it instead of the large one? Or there is another way to see it if you’re not a WP user?
Thanks!!
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Its nice. Thanks cause always make a wonderful this web.
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I cant find the links
When will you guys fix the errors while running spell check—the numbers get all jumbled up and spell check turns off by itself
Also, we need a good google search type of search facility–the current search doesn’t quite cut it
should be able to generate a table of contents for the entire blog
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That’s nice, and cool. Also for anything else than “twitter”, mind them 🙂
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What I’m waiting for, thanks
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this is just great!
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