WP.me — shorten your links
shorten your links — Check out this address: — http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten — If you visit it, you'll end up right back here. The nice thing about it is that it's a short link, about 70% smaller than the permalink for this post. URL shorteners are nothing new …
Context & Ripple Effects
Short URLs were already proliferating in 2009, as mini-links spread across the web, alongside concern that web addresses were becoming unwieldy. WordPress.com is bringing that utility into its own publishing flow rather than leaving authors to use a separate service.
The service reduces a post permalink by about 70%, making the URL itself a more compact unit for sharing and referral.
First-order effects
- WordPress.com publishers can issue wp.me links for their posts, reducing the friction of fitting a permalink into constrained sharing formats.
- WordPress.com becomes the redirecting party for links created through the service, tying outbound sharing of hosted posts to its domain.
Second-order effects
- Independent URL-shortening services face a platform-integrated alternative for WordPress.com authors, for whom a separate shortening step no longer delivers the same convenience.
- Readers and referrers encounter wp.me as an additional branded short-link domain, increasing the importance of recognizing where a compact link resolves.
Third-order effects
- If publishing platforms continue embedding short links, URL shortening shifts from a standalone utility toward a distribution feature controlled by the services that host content.
- The expanding use of redirect-based links makes the intermediary behind a shared address part of the web’s referral infrastructure, not merely a formatting convenience.
The trend: URL shortening is becoming a built-in publishing and sharing capability as platforms seek to control the compact links through which their content travels.