Why a branded URL shortener?

The OECD's URL shortener at oe.cd can be used to create short URLs of OECD websites that can be easily shared, tweeted, or emailed to colleagues and friends.

Obviously, there is a branding angle to it, but at the same time we can guarantee that our short URLs will only ever go to OECD-related websites. Which should be reassuring in today's security-crazy world.

Features

• Shorten a long URL, either to a very short sequential identifier, or to a keyword you have chosen
• Link to OECD-related websites only, guaranteed (yes, this is a feature, not a bug)
• Peruse statistics page with basic analytics information (number of clicks over time, origin, browsers, platforms)
• Search for existing long or short URLs (although we allow duplicates and show them in the stats)
• View different time frames (2 hours, daily, weekly, monthly, all time)
• Batch shorten many long links (available internally only)
• An API to remote-control it (via Tweetdeck, for example)

Stuff to come

There are many other things that one could do with this tool. Do you have an idea? Let us know. Here are couple of our ideas:

• Provide user-specific accounts
• Introduce a concept of private and public short URLs (closely linked to the user accounts feature)
• Integrate with Google Analytics, to make the short URL click histories available in the Google Analytics dashboard.

The design looks familiar ... hmmm

Admittedly, the design has been very strongly inspired by a previous version of Google's URL shortener.