"Jacobs said RunKeeper is poised to hit 5 million users this month, compared to 2 million at the start of the year. After a big spike of one million downloads in the first week of January, new users are still up five times since going free. Interestingly, RunKeeper’s premium $20-a-year Elite service, has also seen a three times increase in purchases, though Jacobs said that, overall, the company is seeing less immediate revenue than prior to the switch."

In his mixergy interview, Andrew Fashion shared his story in great detail about his rise and fall. With respect to the 301 redirect, I asked Andrew to ask him if he 301'd old urls to new ones. Andrew Fashion's response was that he didn't know at the time about 301 redirects and that after he launched his new site he deleted his local copy of the old site. When his traffic plummeted he couldn't go back.

I'm not sure whether to respond to that with "How stupid can you be?" or "I find that very difficult to believe."

I wouldn't panic yet as a .ly domain owner:

"While letters ‘vb’ are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they’re being used as a domain name for an openly admitted ‘adult friendly URL shortener’. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are ‘adult friendly’ to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue."

There is definitely some risk, so mitigate it and buy the ly.com variant of a .ly domain to protect against this - much like ad.ly owns adly.com, embed.ly owns embedly.com.

Watch what bit.ly does - likely nothing right now. If they get warning like vb.ly says they did, we will hear about it, and then every .ly owner has a problem.

I wouldn't panic yet as a .ly domain owner:

"While letters ‘vb’ are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they’re being used as a domain name for an openly admitted ‘adult friendly URL shortener’. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are ‘adult friendly’ to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue."

That said, the value of .ly domains definitely just dropped.

perhaps. where does the line get drawn though? if someone stumbles across an adult-oriented link in your url shortener, will the libyan government take this to be a violation? will they order you to police the links shortened? will they take down your domain? etc..

The line gets drawn wherever they want to draw it. This country banned political parties 40 years ago. Why would you give them money?

i wouldn't, but clearly people have. thats more my point -- if they're okay with doing this, they're probably going to be okay to pull arbitrary content.

There is definitely some risk, so mitigate it and buy the ly.com variant of a .ly domain to protect against this - much like ad.ly owns adly.com, embed.ly owns embedly.com.

Watch what bit.ly does - likely nothing right now. If they get warning like vb.ly says they did, we will hear about it, and then every .ly owner has a problem.

Or, they leave Bitly alone because they're the best-known .ly domain, but fuck with everyone else. Because: they can.