As someone who uses Twitter, find me at @inspecie and now @asest, I often use URL shorteners. Whilst they offer many useful features, making it easier to spread the word webwide about the interesting and entertaining, they can also be used by spammers and those with even more nefarious goals.

When you tweet or post a shortened URL (sURL), the people reading it know it is a kosher link because it comes from you. But re-tweeting and re-posting can mean the identity of that initial poster gets lost.

There is also a potential additional problem, that the shortening service dies and all those links end up pointing to internet heaven. It has already happened and, given the rapid growth in provider numbers, it is certain to happen again. Even worse, the links you posted might end up redirecting people to some adult site.

The answer is simple, control the domain used to shorten the URLs and you ensure the links stay valid. Which is good news for me and anyone else who decides to share the links.

Focussing on articles, posts and websites which deal with economics, the economy and all things financial. They may be links from sites I’m associated with, such as in:specie™ or debtadvicebureau.org.uk, or links corresponding to articles or posts which I’ve read, tweeted about or stumbled. Quite simply they are posts I’ve assessed.

Hence ase.st™.

Which also means, because they are links for pages and sites actually read by a real human being (me), they are going to stay short for quite some time. Well over 46,000 URLs would have to be shortened to exceed the current 15-to-17 character length.

And since the purpose of ase.st™ is to engender trust and provide links which will be useful for years to come, there is absolutely:

• No cloaking;
• No blagging of search engine ranking;
• No sneeky insertion of ads, and;
• Permanent 301 redirects.

The short ase.st™ URL simply redirects you to the original long URL and nothing else. No muss. No fuss.

Of course, there is always a possibility that the destination site will disappear. So there is a contact form, accessible from any page, so that you can notify me of where the shortened link is ending up. If the ase.st™ sURL no longer takes you to the content I originally assessed, then tell me and I will update the links accordingly.

As I’ve said, the point is to have short links you can trust.

In addition, it is expected that there will be occasional posts based on what people are tweeting and reading from ase.st™ and beyond.