…or the sad tale of how I created a service because I thought it was a good idea and it turns out that someone else already made it, and now I don’t really know what to do with it.

I was excited about wheresitgo.com, I was nicing it up, and prepping it for public launch, and then I find out that something nearly identical already exist.

http://longurl.org is the service. It does almost everything I had planned for wheresitgo.com, including things like a greasemonkey script, and a Firefox extension.

The only places I see wheresitgo as ahead are the name, and the extra detail provided, for the nerds. I do have a few cute ideas that they don’t seem to have touched, but is it worth it? Or, do I just ditch this and move on to something new?

As nocash (who deserves lots of credit for back end brains work on wheresitgo) pointed out, there are a whole host of url shorteners out there, so why not make a whole bunch of link investigators?

My questions to you are:

1. Do I throw in the towel because this is essentially covered?
2. If no, what can I do to make mine better than any other?
3. If yes, what the hell do I do with this domain?

A friend (and boss) of mine thought that this would be a good idea, and not being foolish/strange enough to be a coder himself, I decided to make it because it could be useful.

It is a drop in php script that allows you to host your own url shortener / redirector like snurl or tinyurl. Only you will be able to add / remove url’s from it.  This would allow you to essentially brand the url’s you send, or just simplify the linking process on your site or elsewhere.

If you have any trouble, check out the README.txt included, or leave a comment here.

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