The rfly.me Blog.
The latest news and announcements from the team at rfly.me.
jk
URLs created with rfly.me before August 30th 2009 will no longer redirect.
This is a one off. In the end, we had a 50/50 decision to make: Stick with our current system, and never advance due to a crippled API - or - drop everything, start again from scratch, and progress hugely.
Let me tell you now: That was one HARD decision to make.
But we made it. Either way we would have been unpopular. If we’d had stuck were we where, we’d never of been able to implement some of the features user have (and still are) literally - begging - us for.
Re-building rfly.me and it’s API’s from the ground upwards allows us to innovate in areas we perviously couldn’t.
Hopefully people will understand and see that.
The re-vamped service should be back online starting September 4th 2009.
September 09
RE: Non-Redirecting URLs
2009 rfly.me. Browser Version 2.0. All Rights Reserved.
October 09
Tweetie 2 and RFly.Me
jk
As of October 9th 2009, you can now use our rfly.me URL shortening service in Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 2 for iPhone (and iPod touch), thanks to a new feature in the software.
Yesterday, Tweetie 2 was announced. I and James had been looking forward to this major release, ever since Loren let is slip it was being worked on at his Stanford University talk about iPhone application development.
Why were we looking forward to it so much? A few months ago we contacted Loren to ask if it would be possible to include rfly.me in Tweetie. Loren was quick to respond stating that it was possible, but due to so many URL shorteners existing, he couldn’t hard code them all into Tweetie.
What Loren did say though, is that he was working on a new feature which would allow this to happen. About a week or two ago, Loren gave us the heads up on this. Custom URL shortening endpoints.
Using this we could now integrate rfly.me with Tweetie 2 simply by giving the end user a special URL which called our service API.
Today we’re officially making our API information to do this, public. Simply head on over to our ‘RFly.Me Tweetie 2 API’ page, and follow the instructions to setup rfly.me using Tweetie 2.
We’d like to thank everyone for their patience in waiting for this, and continuing to support the service as you all did, while you did. As you can probably understand, we didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag, too early on. ;)
Since making this information available to the public we’ve had numerous developers contact us to say they too will be including rfly.me in their applications - and we couldn’t be happier.
Never did we think that on that summers afternoon when we came up with the idea for the service, that the response would be this big.
With nearly 5,000 URLs shortened, and 60,821 overall clicks to date, we can’t wait to collaborate with more of you, to bring rfly.me to more and more applications.
Thank you.
Even though we have faced some negative comments this past week for taking the site offline we're now back, bigger and better. We faced a tough choice within the first few weeks of launching rfly.me. We had a huge demand for custom URL's and also requests for url stats and a general improved service.
We are happy to announce, we have done just that! Not only can you shorten URL's with us but you can customize the URL, to anything you want and get feedback on your URL's stats.
We have launched rfly.me 2.0 with a new database, leaving the old database behind. We are very aware that some of our users were unhappy with this and we are very understanding, it was a very tough choice we have had to make in making this move, although it may have not made sense to everyone, due to implications we're weren't able to port across existing data. We hope that our users will continue to use the server with the guarantee that this will never happen again!
Along with custom URL's we are extremely happy to announce our brand new service: img.rfly.me. Along with these additions we have added integration for Tweetie on Mac, FaceBook and FriendFeed. Now there’s even more ways to share your shortened rfly.me URL!
If there’s a service you'd like to see let us know!
We really hope you enjoy it. Thanks for sticking with us.
September 09
.. and we’re back!
November 09
100,000 Clicks.
jk
On October 31st 2009 RFly.Me Hit 100,000 Clicks.
RFly.Me version 2.0 along with our new API launched on September 4th 2009. Just a month and a half later, we’ve already surpassed 100,000 clicks.
Just - Wow.
Of course, to everyone who has shortened, or clicked our URLs, we also thank YOU, because without YOU, this wouldn’t have been possible.
With even more Mac (and iPhone) developers interested in collaborating with us to bring rfly.me to their applications, we can only hope this will continue to grow substantially in the future.
We can’t wait to see where this goes ..
December 09
10,000 URLS Shortened!
Well, we did it. At 16.45pm (BST) we surpassed 10,000 URLs in our database. After launching RFly.Me version 2.0 on September 4th 2009, Today on December 20th (and just in time for Christmas) we’ve hit 10K.
We’d like to thank everyone who made this possible, that means everyone who has shortened, everyone who has re-tweeted, every developer who has contacted us requesting our API for their iPhone or Mac projects. We’d like to thank you all.
To celebrate we’re giving iPhone developers to chance to grab ONE of TEN FREE front-page ad slots on rfly.me. Simply shoot us mail at info [at] rfly.me, or join in on our tweetblast!
Theres more to come in the very near future from rfly.me, and we can’t wait to share it with you.