TinyURL Blocked In Saudi Arabia
April 17, 2009
Committee to Protect Bloggers reports that TinyURL has been blocked in Saudi Arabia. The URL shortener service is not the only option out there for your shortened URLs, but it is the default one for Twitter, so if you want to reach the Saudi followers you’d better use another service. I should also link the Facebook group that wants TinyURL unblocked, but I doubt it’ll do any good, at least not with a mere 19 members.
Thord Daniel Hedengren
Thord Daniel Hedengren is a designer, writer, and blogger, and also the former editor of The Blog Herald. He used to be a hotshot in the gaming industry in Sweden, but sold everything and went International. Most recently he wrote a book called Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, and does loads of kickass design.
Yes tinyurl.com has been blocked in Saudi Arabia for a while. I’m a Saudi and had troubles with the blocking.
That thing drove me to develop a web service to retrieve original URLs from tiny ones, Untiny.
http://untiny.com/
Many Saudi twitter users now use it daily. Also they use the different addons developed by bloggers based on Untiny Application Programming Interface (API) that make the untiny process automaticly done through browsing.
http://untiny.com/extra
Thanks for your concern!