Keeping Short URLs in Mzansi (South Africa)
Mzansi
Just got word of a local start up called Mzansi. Mzansi is a South African word for, ummm, “South Africa”. A really good name for a local start up I guess.
Mzansi is a URL shortner pretty much like any other URL shortner. Enter your extremely long(ish) URL and get a nice short one that you can use anywhere, forever. Exactly like this http://mzan.si/XJvM. Mzansi bagged the mzan.si domain which keeps the URL nice and short which is exactly what a URL shortening service needs to be doing.
Now if you really want to take it a step further you can register for the service and gain access to a few very useful features. One of them is sharing your link on Twitter, which is pretty average in the greater scheme of things and having such a variety of URL Shorteners to choose from it has not sold us yet.
The other feature that they offer is quite a bit more useful. Similar to bit.ly you can track how your shortened URL is doing out in the world wide web through the stats interface. You will get info such as how often the link was clicked and where around the world it was clicked.
Now we fully back local start ups but when you have services like bit.ly and many others then you gotta wonder if this is just another addition to a crowded market or if they will add some interesting features that will seperate them from the rest. For one they could get an API out there for local blogs to use with tools such as Twitter Tools and Gatorpeep Tools (with a bit of hacking of course).
This was posted by Seagyn Davis who has posted 212 items.
→ Heidi said on: February 19, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Hi Seagyn,
Nice post, thanks! Mzan.si is a living thing and there are definitely plans to grow this baby in future. I personally believe an API is a must and is at the top of my list of improvements.
Watch this space!
→ Seagyn Davis said on: February 22, 2010 at 9:08 am
Thanks Heidi. Please let us know.