What do right and left wing, Democrat and Republican Americans who use twitter have in common? They’re using a domain registered from the Libyan government. Both bit.ly and ow.ly use the Libyan country domain .ly for their URL shorteners, which people who twitter use to shorten their links to fit in the 140 character limit imposed by twitter. Both are US companies who are using the .ly domain for branding…what were they thinking? Who’s next, .ir and Ahmadinejad’s Iran?

These tools can take this URL
http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=156359&cat=12

and create a 2nd link that is much shorter and saves space in twitter tweets.
http://4wrd.us/ahox

We’ve launched an American competitor to bit.ly, it’s 4wrd.US the american URL shortener it’s simple to use and it’s owned, operated and hosted in the USA. So tell muammar gaddafi goodbye.

Tell everyone your know USE http://4wrd.US

Tags: bit ly controversy, bit.ly, bit.ly controversy, libya, ow.ly, TLD

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Bad Business Practices, Daily Musings, Entrepreneurship, US Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.