Thanks to Brian Solis and Jess3 for including Culld.us in their Twitterverse diagram.

“TinyURL is not the only local URL-trimming option. Garrick Van Buren of St. Anthony Village provides a URL shortener as part of his Web-based Cullect RSS-feed reader at cullect.com.” - Julio Ojeda-Zapata

“Presenting information as a news feed where the user isn’t pressured to read every item or feel like a failure is one way to move the needle on the user experience here…” - Dare Obasanjo

Dare - you’re right. There’s lots of room for innovation in the feed reader space. For that innovation (and profit) to occur - previous assumptions and models need to be completely ignored. In fact, to build Cullect, I needed to stop using a feed reader all together.

Check out some of the things people have said about Cullect.

“Since comments are published through the reader’s social networks or blog, your content gains greater exposure. But wait, there’s more. This method of commenting also serves to repel trolls and comment spam.” - Tom Elko

‘Comment via Cullect’ is a re-working of the Item Stats widget that’s driving the URL shortener.

Here’s the recorded video from the event, Tom’s presentation is about 50 minutes in.

Thanks again Tom - I’m excited to have this out in the wild.

If you want a sneak peak of where it’s going, check out Tom Elko’s presentation at Ignite Minneapolis on Wednesday April 22.

Shortened URL services - minnpo.st, grv.me, etc - will be impacted by this outage (more on this later).

I promptly blocked their IP, wiped the offending URLs from the system and reset the cache.

This experience brings to mind an after hours conversation I had with a couple U of MN network security guys about inherent security risks of short URL services.

Cullect currently recognizes 83 URL shortening services.

EIGHTY-THREE

I’m hard pressed to think of 83 providers of anything (outside of entertainment services). That’s a measure of demand if anything. Even more reason publishers should - as Dave Winer recommends - pull this capability under their own umbrella.

“Every web app that produces long urls should provide a built-in url-shortening facility.” - Dave Winer

“Actually I can’t imagine they view the reader as, in any way, a publisher. Of course I think of everyone as a publisher, even if all they publish are a stream of articles they’ve read. Ultimately I think in 20 years there will be no such thing as someone who only reads.” - Dave Winer

1. The principle of reader-is-also-publisher is the basis for Cullect.
2. From what I’ve seen, it take 20 years to build a successful company. I think it’d be fantastic if Cullect could have 2 decades behind it.

URL shortening: ON
Short URL redirects: ON (as I mentioned, some urls from last week might be broken)
Reading Lists: ON
Feed Updating: OFF until the 2nd DB comes back online later today.

After looking for ways to re-sync them without doing a massive re-import, I’m biting the bullet - and re-importing everything into the most-out-of-sync database.

This means, in an effort to minimize missing anything else, I’ll be down for the night again.
(including url shortening/redirecting).

I’m expecting a day or two to confirm everything is as it should be, so once I’m back, please send in bug reports - either email or @cullect on Twitter - if something’s not as it should be (recommendations not showing up, short links not redirecting where they should, etc).

I know you will.