I was deeply saddened to learn that http://redf.in was taken. In fact it was registered only days before I realized we should grab it. I wanted to grab it so we could do this:
Which was inspired by Zappos:
I pitched the team on doing this recently and was challenged by Mike, our CTO, on whether people would really use it.
GOOD QUESTION.
Both Amazon and Zappos have branded short URLs and I pulled the numbers on Tweets per day for the last two weeks using their branded short URLs:
- Amazon: 10 tweets/day
- Zappos: 5.4 tweets/day
Considering “redfin” has been getting just 12.5 tweets/day I’m now not convinced that our own branded short URL would be a raging success either in terms of inbound links or click-thrus.
But I’ve been wrong before!
Note: It may have taken me longer to think about and write this post than it would have taken a Redfin dev to have coded this feature :).