Domain hacks aren't exactly new, but with a bumper crop of URL shortening services doing business under two-letter country domains these days, we wanted to know: Where exactly is that? And is the government over there any good?
Thank Twitter for the hubbub. The popular microblogging service's 140-character post limit first created the need to cut down on link sizes. Services like tinyurl.com were quick to oblige, allowing users to create short strings on the fly and use them in their tweets to save space.
It didn't take long before people realized little-used, two-letter country domains were even more efficient, and offered the chance for some cute wordplay. The race was on. New URL shortening services launched this month include Google's Goo.gl, Facebook's FB.me, YouTube's youtu.be and the Republican party's GOP.am.
Ph.ew.
That's barely the tip of the iceberg. All told, we tracked down more than two-dozen URL shorteners using domains from 21 countries scattered across the globe, from tiny island nations to G7 members, and at least one former Soviet bloc country.
To help you navigate the mess, we put together an interactive map of the countries where today's URL shortening services registered their wacky domain names, the authority that registered them and a short political summary of each country. The results might surprise you. Bit.ly -- the most popular URL shortener in the world -- is registered in Libya, a dictatorship with historical ties to terrorism. What about GOP.am, is.gd and blip.fm?
Find out here:
