Now Even The New York Times Is Entering The URL Shortening Arena … Kinda

Earlier today I covered two new URL shortening services, UnHub and LNK.by , the latest additions to the plethora of basic web applications that many people are growing accustomed to for sharing links on micro-sharing services and social networking sites. And just when I thought I'd had it with that type of service for a while, we caught wind of one that made me raise my eyebrows. Enter NytUrl , the 'trusted' URL shortener for NYtimes.com articles. According to the website, the service shortens URLs for NYTimes.com articles, although a quick test shows that it's definitely not restricted to other websites (see http://nyturl.com/34 and http://nyturl.com/35 - also shows the sequence is just a numeric one), even if it occasionally says the URL is not valid for any other site. This of course defeats the entire purpose of the service, which is to reassure people clicking the links that they'll wind up on the NYTimes.com website. My guess is that the ability to add links to other websites will be disabled soon enough.