Update: URLTea NOT Dead??

Well, just as its downtime was unannounced, so too is its resurrection. Out of habit I went to shrink down a url using my URLTea bookmarklet (which I refused to dispose of until I knew for sure), lo and behold it worked! Not only did it work, it worked super fast.

What is going on in the land of URLTea? There have been no changes to the site, no updates. Nothing about the downtime on Brett Taylor’s blog. Nothing from Chris Pirillo, the instigator of the URLtea project on the outage either.

From the URLTea site, it can be inferred that this was never intended to be a total shutdown, because they claim they’ll notify users via the homepage well before an official shutdown.

What plans do you have for urlTea?

We want urlTea to be the best URL shortening service on the net. We value open source and transparency.

In the unlikely event that for some reason we can’t support urlTea, we will gladly hand over all source code, intellectual property, domain names and the urlTea database to a trusted and capable entity who will uphold the values that urlTea is being built on.

If no entity is found to pass the teapot to, we’ll give 90 days notice that we’re shutting down via the homepage.

(Bold added for emphasis.)

So what happened here? No notice of shutdown, long outage, no notable communication from the creators and operators. Then poof! They’re back? Well, I’m glad they’re back because I like the simplicity of URLtea, but can the URLtea users deal with another unexplained outage? Seems doubtful.

Got dirt on the situation? Comment!

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1 Comment »

  1. RKNet Blog… thing » URLtea Bites It Again said,

    June 9, 2008 @ 1:14 pm

    [...] like I had spoken too soon about URLtea being back in it to win [...]

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