WordPress.com has launched its own URL shortening service with the name wp.me. As discussed in my previous post for creating your own URL shortening service using google App engine, that everyone today is going after this URL shortening services. The early days we used to have is tinyurl, but then with the evolution of twitter, everyone just jumped into this business from digg.com, to stumbleupon. Resulting in many URL shortening services today and the list is endless. 
However wp.me is different than the other URL shortening services in the following 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.
WordPress people decide to launch this after tr.im declared that they are going to shutdown by end of this year, but at the last moment they got saved. But if that was supposed to get true then all URLs which are bookmarked or being used with tr.im will go 404. That means, you can never reach to the actual pages behind those short URLs. As a result this has shaken the credebility of many URL shortening services. If wordpresss has its own URL shortening service that means you can trust the one and cannot expect it to cease in the near future.
WordPress also supports this service for the self-hosted wordpress installs provided you have installed and activated their inhouse plugin called Stats plugin.
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.
Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla
