The $6,000 contest
John Chow and XR.com are giving away $6,000 in a new blog contest. $5,000 will be donated to a charity of the winner's choosing and $1,000 will be awarded directly to the winner. If I win the contest, I would donate the five thousand to
St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix, AZ. But what would I do with the one thousand? I'm not quite sure, but I would probably use it to further my online businesses and assets.
So what is XR.com? XR.com is a new tiny URL application that provides URL shortening services. Why would you want to shorten URL's? There are many reasons. Here are a few;
The Microsoft Outlook email client breaks long hyperlinks that extend onto two lines, hindering the recipients from opening the web page that you intended to send them.
URL shortening services can be used to hide affiliate links. As some users might be put off or negatively view affiliate links, XR.com can be used to disguise the end destination.
Many messaging services have character limitations, making a URL shortening service attractive. Some of these services include text messaging, Twitter and pagers.
So let's try it out shall we? We signed into our account on XR.com and input the URL http://www.johnchow.com/6000-contest-from-john-chow-and-xrcom/ into the shortening service. XR.com was kind enough to notify us that this URL had already been shortened by someone else! There was no need to generate a new one. The preexisting short URL is http://xr.com/guk.
We also wanted to create our own unique XR.com shortened URL, so we input http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/ into the XR.com shortening service and it came up with http://xr.com/jlf.
Some of the other interesting options available to users include click through statistics for each shortened URL that you create, preview options by using the subdomain preview.xr.com, options to remove the XR top frame from redirects, make the shortened URL private and custom shortened URL's.
XR.com truly is a TINY URL service. These are some of the smallest URL's I have ever seen produced by a shortening service. If I had one suggestion for improvement for XR.com, I would suggest that they remove the XR top frame from the redirects by default, without making users go in and edit the shortened URL settings to remove it.
