What is this short URL thing?
Short URLs have been around for a while, but they were made popular by Twitter and the need to keep status updates under 140 characters. Basically they’re a compressed form of a full-blown URL, and when you click on them you’ll be redirected to the original URL. Well-known providers of short URLs which you might’ve seen include TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, or tr.im. We have been using bit.ly for quite a while, and have recently starting using our own domain for this, playfi.sh. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s an example: the URL http://www.playfish.com/?page=game_pets will be turned into http://playfi.sh/7YtOFw - that’s 39 characters turned into 23, a 40% reduction. Since the short URLs will always be fixed size, the length of the original URL doesn’t matter.
Why do you use short URLs?
We use both Twitter and Facebook to announce new features, promotions, news, etc. Since it’s vital to keep the character count to a minimum in order to have enough characters left for the message itself, short URLs help us in that respect. Also, if you then want to share a Playfish short URL, you’ll also save characters.
Are short URLs safe?
We have used bit.ly for this so far, but recently we’ve moved to using our own domain for URL shortening, playfi.sh. That means that when you see a URL starting with http://playfi.sh/ you can be sure it’s from us, and conversely if someone gives you a short URL claiming it’s from Playfish, you’ll know it’s really not unless it starts with http://playfi.sh/
