My URL is Shorter (and Prettier) Than Yours

URL shorteners are unsung heroes, they've been there since 2002, bit.ly made them almost famous in 2005. Today blogs like Read Write Web (rww.to) and Tech Crunch (tcrn.ch) or large-scale social platforms such as Flickr (flic.kr), YouTube (youtu.be), Instagram (instagr.am) and twitter (t.co) provide automatic URL shortening, being the latter perhaps the main culprit generating advocacy. Why? Text-real-state. The famous micro-blogging platform allows only 140 characters per post, making it very difficult for people to share regular links in it and things get only worse if they want to add a brief description.Today we can say, that URL Shorteners and Twitter go hand by hand making it easier to share relevant and reliable information across the world, but it wasn't getting any better.With something else in mind I decided to register the domain eam.mx. I wanted to have a meaningful URL for personal and professional proposes (which will be eventually unveiled as the site develops), so I decided to use my initials and the ccTLD of my beloved country, Mexico.Then the idea came to my head, the domain was neat and small, and I thought it'd be a good idea (specially since I share a lot of links in twitter) to give my shared-links my name. I setup a server, installed some applications into it, configured them, and now, every time I post something here I tweet the title of my post and a shortened URL that has my initials in it.There are many reasons to do this, some of these reasons are:

• bit.ly is getting bigger. The URL shortening page is used by millions everyday and that reflects on the size of the URL. The day this post was written it was as long as 13 characters (bit.ly/xxxxxx). Mine is (eam.mx/x).
• It's safe. Unfortunately, bit.ly hides (due to its nature) the target URL which could be risky, as you don't really know where you're headed after clicking. Having a personalised URL shortener, makes your link trustworthy (perhaps not at the beginning, but you'll get there).
• It looks good. You've got to admit, that ur.name/something looks better than anything else.
• No coding needed. There are several application that work almost out of the box. You'll need to feel comfortable with terms relating DNS, db, API, application tokens, etc.

As more companies adopt the URL Shortening service and settles. We will see a considerable growth of individuals pursuing the same goal, where a potential market for all-ready solutions for personal Online Identity Management might arise.