Another clone?

We are online. We didn’t officially launch the service yet, but we are open our work to some beta testers (early adopters) in order to collect feedbacks and also to check and verify if we are working on the right things in the the right way.

Of course ‘right’ is a meaningless word, because it has just a relative and not universal value. Thus, some feedbacks and thoughts are not so helpful, even if they’re useful because they help us improving our ability to be ‘bullshit-proof’.

I think it’s very important to develop one point (one question) from the first feedbacks we got in these days. The question is why we need another URL shortener? At first sight this question is good for us because it allows me to explain what we think about this topic.

First of all I want to exclude the quick answer,¹ then I want to clarify the nature of our project: our goals is not to build (just) a shortener. We already have a huge choice about URLs shortening services, we don’t need another one.² What we dream to build is a social environment where we can do things and find new solutions for old problems, moving from URLs.

Internet is a big hole never full of contents. Contents could be words (in many languages!), numbers, videos, photos, and relations between them. But all the contents on the internet have in common links. Links are URLs, so we can say there is neither information nor knowledge without sharing URLs. That’s why we started yoc.to: we want to move from the (useful) shortening focus to the broader problem of how build sense from the huge amount of informations we share every day. We believe to have an answer. Probably is not the answer, because the answer doesn’t exist, but we believe to have something that could help in the hard work of building a better internet for all. Stay tuned.

1. That is: come on, you really think we spent money and time just for cloning another service from the dozens we already could actually use? [↩]
2. Even if I believe the quality of an instrument/service doesn’t rely on a selective process that brings to a monopoly, but it relies on the presence of an open, pluralistic and competitive environment allowing the broadest possibility of choice [↩]