If you’ve been to unurthme.com recently you’ll no doubt have noticed that there’s a coming soon page up.
What’s going on? A whole new Unurthme.com is getting ready to launch.
Keep your eyes on this blog, more info will be coming soon.
Unurthme is proud to announce the immediate availability of Ree.mx (pronounced “remix”), our new URL shortening service.
What is a URL shortener? Twitter users are probably already quite familiar with just how bad long URL’s are in a post since you only have 140 characters total for your message including any URL’s you post.
Using Ree.mx you can take a URL of any length and create an alias to it that is less than 20 characters long.
For example, a URL like this:
http://www.superduperlongurlthatnobodylikes/evenmorejunk/longerlongerlongerstill
Into one like this:
http://ree.mx/10
Better, right? 
When someone goes to the short URL our servers will automatically redirect them to the long URL.
Check it out at http://ree.mx and start remixing your URL’s down to a manageable size!
Geesh, has it really been that long since I’ve last updated the blog? Okay, just a short one for now. Development of Unurthme version 2.0 is well underway and is shaping great. Really happy with it. Completely new UI, written from the ground up to be sleek, engaging and easy to use.
Will be posting some teaser screenshots in the weeks to come, stay tuned…
We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about Unurthme so far and we’re taking the best of those, mixing in a few ideas of our own, and as of a few days ago planning is underway for Unurthme version 2.
It’s too early now to get into what exactly the differences will be, but I promise they’ll be good and well worth the wait. If you like what you’ve seen so far, you’ll love the new stuff. Not a fan yet? We think you will be when you see what’s coming.
Sooo…wondering where the iPhone optimized version of the site is? It’s alive and well, but when some of the ideas for the new Unurthme came up we knew we had to focus 100% of our time on that. The iPhone version will be coming, but not until it’s up to the level of the new Unurthme.
Sharing links and updating your status on MySpace is now live on Unurthme.
Now, from one place, you can update your status message and easily share links on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
Where’s the iPhone optimized version of Unurthme? In the final stages of development and testing, and it’s performing great! Expect to be able to get your hands on it by tomorrow night, so keep watching this blog for more info.
Updated 9/8/09 @ 7:52am: A couple of last minute bugs caused us to delay the launch of the iPhone optimized version of the site, but they shouldn’t take long to fix…stay tuned…
Have a link you just found and want to share with your friends on Facebook or Twitter? Now sharing that link is easier than ever before.
When signed into your free Unurthme account, just click on the usual share icon and three new options are available in the upper right to:
Some of you might be wondering what the big deal is about shortening a URL. If you’re a regular Twitter user you probably already know the benefit of this, but if not here’s what it means.
Say you have a URL that you want to share with someone. If it’s relatively short like, say, http://www.unurthme.com, it’s just 23 characters so it’s pretty short and can pretty easily fit into a status message or Tweet. But what if it looks more like this:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/go/reader_discussion_what_sets_the_iphone_3gs_apart/
A lot longer and probably not something you’d want to stick into a Facebook or Twitter post. Heck, on Twitter that URL alone takes up 83 characters, so more than have of your 140 character post limit is just the URL and you haven’t even said what the URL is for yet!
That’s where a shortened URL come in handy.
The exact same URL shortened at one of the popular shortening services Bit.ly, looks like this:
That’s right, down from 83 characters to just 20 so it can fit nicely into Facebook or Twitter.
How does it work? Okay, the short version: The URL shortening service (in this case, Bit.ly), creates an alias for the longer URL so when you go to the short version it goes to their site and when it sees “12h5qG” it redirects your web browser to the full, unshortened URL.
But what about MySpace? Don’t worry, it’s coming.
Take it for a spin and see what you think, and if you run into any problems you can contact us anytime.
The new external provider integration has been validated in our development environment and will be moved into production later tonight.
What that means to you is that if you login via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google, etc., the interface will be a little different and you’ll have even be a few new options to chose from. More details in a bit…
Updated 8/29/09 @ 5:32pm: All done! The list of external providers has been expanded to now include:
These changes also give us more flexibility so now we can focus on getting the iPhone version of the site finished up and out the door. What does that mean? A special version of Unurthme optimized specifically for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch! All the great Unurthme features you’re used to, plus the ability to update Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace all from one spot! Look for it to go live this coming week.
The special iPhone optimized version of Unurthme is so, so close to be rolled out. One thing jumped in front of it in the priority queue, better social networking integration.
The social networking integration we have now with sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace is good, but we’ve found a way to improve things on the back end a bit that will give us more flexibility in which platforms we are able to support moving forward, so that is literally being worked on as we speak.
The new social networking integration will be rolled out to the main Unurthme site first, then integrated into the upcoming iPhone version, and finally the iPhone version will be launched.
The new social networking integration will be going live this coming week, and look for the iPhone optimized version of Unurthme to launch the following week.
Stay tuned, cool things coming…
We just enabled our new Twitter search option, so now when selecting a search type you’ll be able to choose Twitter.