After nearly two years online, Gilbertson claims more than 1.7 million TinyURLs, which have earned the site more than 21 million hits in the past month alone.
While the service is and will remain free, Gilbertson pledges, he is making some money from advertisements and donations. He hopes to introduce premium services and an enterprise version early in 2004.
Enter the spammers Users of TinyURL range from discussion group participants to print media outlets to customer service call centres, according to Gilbertson.
Unfortunately, the services also include spammers.
"Abuse by spammers is the big problem with TinyURL," Gilbert wrote in an instant-message interview. "In fact, during this interview, I had to disable a TinyURL due to spam."
In the hands of spammers, TinyURL has the potential to sag under enormous demand and attract the vociferous complaints that spam can incite.
Gilbertson says he disables spam-related URLs one by one, following tips sent to an abuse address and notifications by SpamCop, an antispam group.
At five characters following the tinyURL.com domain, TinyURLs are comparatively brief. But they're already one character bigger than they were last week, as Gilbertson had to lengthen the string to accommodate demand.
The five-character string will accommodate 39m substitutions when certain easily confused characters -- the lowercase "L" and the number "1" -- are grouped, according to Gilbertson.
In revamping the service, Gilbertson also started assigning TinyURLs at random, rather than sequentially, in response to security concerns about easily guessable URLs.
Gilbertson doubts he will ever run out of TinyURLs, no matter how much demand the site gets.
