In a misguided attempt to score some cheap advertising on the back of patriotism, South African Tourism commissioned Quirk eMarketing to create a URL shortening service called mzan.si. The idea is good, but the implementation doesn't work. Don't make the mistake, in an injudicious fit of South African pride, to use it.
Many URL shorteners exist. The granddaddy of them all is tinyurl.com, but it has largely been succeeded by even shorter ones, such as bit.ly, ow.ly or is.gd. Taking advantage of unused domains in country domains such as Libya (.ly), Montserrat (.ms), Tonga (.to) or Grenada (.gd), they combine these with an incomprehensible but short code that identifies a much longer target URL. For services where message length is an issue, such as Twitter, such shorteners have become essential.
Some also offer additional services, such as tracking how many people clicked on the link you created, or revealing trends based on the millions of short links created daily.
For reasons of branding, a number of Web sites have launched their own short URL service. For example, the New York Times uses nyti.ms, TechCrunch uses tcrn.ch, and local magazine The Daily Maverick (disclaimer: I'm one of its columnists) has implemented thedm.biz. Some are powered by existing services, such as the ever-popular and powerful bit.ly, while some consist merely of a server-side script that redirects Web browsers to the correct long URL.
Enter South African Tourism. It saw an opportunity to create a uniquely South African shortener, and picked the inspired name mzan.si, using Slovenia's top-level domain. Unfortunately, it demanded from its implementation partner, Quirk eMarketing, that all pages accessed via mzan.si are framed.
Cindy Alvarez, product manager of KISSmetrics, recently spoke at a conference on lean start-ups, and said: "The customer is the expert, you're just a note-taker."
That sounds pretty. I'd have wholeheartedly endorsed the sentiment if it weren't for one problem: it is not true.
The case of SA Tourism and Quick eMarketing demonstrates this. By insisting on framing content, SA Tourism has made the same mistake that HootSuite first made with ow.ly, and Digg first made with its own shortener. An expert in social media would have known the consequences of framing, as documented, for example, here and here. Both have bowed to public pressure and removed the frames.
Framing a target page means that instead of redirecting to the target URL, the desired page is served from the URL shortener's own server, usually below a banner of some description. When you arrive at the target page, the URL bar will contain not the page's real URL, but the short URL that got you there.
A URL shortener that doesn't work on mobiles is a URL shortener that doesn't work, full stop.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
The apparent upside of framing a target page is the ability to offer related services, or advertising. The latter was SA Tourism's reason for insisting on such a frame. It wanted marketing for South Africa to be visible to anyone visiting a mzan.si short URL.
When mzan.si first launched, one was unable to break out of the mzan.si frame at all. If you navigated away from the target page by clicking on a link, the browser title bar and URL remained stubbornly the same.
In response to complaints that this kind of hijacking breaks the Internet in a fundamental way, a "close" button was added to the frame. Unfortunately, this does not really solve the problem.
No matter where you've browsed to, the close button can only return you to the original page. There is no record of the pages you visited, and no way to discover or use their URLs. The only way to find them again is to repeat the same link sequence from the now-unframed target page. This is not only an inconvenience; it is a potential security threat not to know the URL of the page you're on.
Worse, the frame code that is added to target pages does not render properly on all browsers. Tested on my HTC Hero, for example, one cannot scroll beyond the square originally displayed on-screen. The close button also does not work.
In short, when someone sends me a link shortened with mzan.si, and I am on my mobile, I cannot access it at all. A recent survey by Fuseware, a Cape Town social media agency, concluded that as many as 40% of South African Twitter users access the service from their mobile phones. A URL shortener that doesn't work on mobiles is a URL shortener that doesn't work, full stop.
On a PC, you can access the page, but only at the cost of having an unwanted frame imposed on you. This has, besides the drawbacks mentioned earlier, another implication.
Web site owners go to great lengths to try to earn enough from their own advertising to keep the site going. This is hard in the hyper-competitive online world, where even fairly popular Web sites earn a pittance from advertising by comparison with other media, such as print, radio or television.
For a URL shortener to hijack their content and place additional advertising over it is deeply unethical. Digg and HootSuite discovered this the hard way. There is no reason why SA Tourism should repeat their mistake.
Here's what SA Tourism should do: Stop framing mzan.si pages. Just send people where they want to go. The mzan.si homepage can contain all the marketing for Brand South Africa it wants to. By adding useful services, such as link tracking metrics or trend spotting to the home page, users will have plenty reason to visit it and South Africa will get plenty of mileage out of the URL mzan.si.
In the meantime, it would be wise not use mzan.si. It is broken, and many of the recipients of your link will either just ignore it, or ask for it to be resent using a shortening service that actually works.
This ham-handed approach to social media will have only one result: to harm South Africa's reputation. One presumes this is not why SA Tourism invested in mzan.si.
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