May 09, 2009

From amazon.com to amzn.com

In Facebook and Twitter, two rapidly growing social networks, updates must be short (less than 140 letters on Twitter, for example). This constraint leads to the parallel growth of shortening services, such as tinyurl.com, minilien.com, bit.ly, is.gd, cli.gs, tr.im, u.nu...
One of the effects of the use of mini-links is to hide brands. Does this harm brands? Possibly: Amazon.com decided to launch its own URL shortener: amzn.com.
Amazon has started many trends. Can its last move inspire other companies? If this were the case, short domain names, long known for being very valuable, could become even more valuable!

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