LinkBlip makes your digital life easier by tracking links
Written on February 18, 2008 – 5:37 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A 25-year old web developer from Seattle just made my life as a blogger somewhat easier. On a daily basis I send out approximately ten emails with questions, meant for CEO’s, fellow bloggers and entrepreneurs, you name it. Because they’re all suffering from the information overload, some emails might be left unanswered. There’s of course the build-in read notification, yet it’s generally experienced as annoying and it creates a weird feeling of obligation. Now this guy from Seattle, Matthew Inman, created a service that makes it possible to monitor links I’ve send out.
In just six hours he built LinkBlip, a service that generates a trackable link. Just copy/paste it in your email and you’ll receive an email when the recipient has clicked on it. Now you at least know whether the unanswered email was seen by the recipient or not. Moreover, you know where he or she is based. It looks something like this:
There’s one downside to this service. The evil-minded now have a new way to bully someone with a enormous load of emails. All they have to do is submit the email addresses of potential victim and then post it on Twitter or something like that. Maybe Matthew will sacrifice one more hour of his spare time to build some sort of security measurement.
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By critic on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply
Cool service; thanks for the tip.
Seems like protection could work something like this: Just before linkblip sends out the notification that someone clicked on the link, linkblip should check to see when the last notification was sent out to this person. If it was within the past 4 hours, “batch it up”. Every hour or so, run through the batched up ones, and if any notices are more than 4 hours old, send out ONE notification to that person for ALL the clicks over the past 4 hours.
Then you’d get immediate notification if someone clicked, but you wouldn’t get flooded with them. The most you’d ever get is 6 notifications per day.
By joshua on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply
It’s indeed a very neat service. Thanks!
Oh, and I don’t want to bore you, but “In just six hours he build LinkBlip” should be “In just six hours he built LinkBlip”. Built is past simple.
But it is a good post anyway…
By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply
@joshua and other readers: please always let us know if you see typos like that! Changed it…
By bleu on Feb 19, 2008 | Reply
I built this functionality into my own site about a year ago, which sends out emails automatically upon an info request so i can monitor the user generated ads, it works very well.