Short Link Structure

We've had some requests, both from 3rd party developers and from users, to make our links a bit more distinguishable. Today we've made a slight change to the way our links work to support this. Any new Drop on Droplr will now look like this:

• http://d.pr/i/code - Image
• http://d.pr/v/code - Video
• http://d.pr/a/code - Audio
• http://d.pr/n/code - Note
• http://d.pr/f/code - File
• http://d.pr/code - Shortened Link (redirect)

This change will provide a couple of benefits:

1. When anyone sees a Droplr link they'll now clearly be able to discern the content type before viewing the drop. Because Droplr supports so many different content types, this can really be helpful in providing some context to a link before someone needs to visit it.

2. This will allow us and 3rd party developers to treat different content type drops in special ways. E.g., now that we know a drop is an image before someone views it, we can reliably provide a preview thumbnail. Or now that we know a drop is an audio drop, an app can provide a player instead of the link to more quickly consume it.

A couple notes about this change:

1. When Droplr was first created, one of its primary uses was shortening links for Twitter. We did our absolute best to make our URL structure as short as possible to provide the maximum space for tweet content. However, now that Twitter has its own link shortening service (t.co), this has become less necessary. Because of this, we deemed the extra 2 characters worth the added benefits.

2. The shorter URL will always work. E.g., if Droplr returns to you http://d.pr/i/1234 and you'd still like to share http://d.pr/1234, you're more than welcome to and it'll work fine. Any applications that take advantage of the new link format to do interesting things will simply just see your link as a standard link instead.

3. We decided not to add the new structure to link drops. Since users do still use Droplr as a link shortening service, we decided to keep those as short as possible.

4. We will be allowing Droplr Pro users to turn this completely off if they so desire. You'll simply need to use the custom domain option and put in "d.pr" as your custom domain.

5. This will not affect any users with custom domains. Because there's no way for an app to know if a custom domain is a Droplr domain without first checking, the additional link structure has limited benefit and therefore will not be included.