Nigeria’s YRN.ME Redesigns, Rolls Out New Features

Nigerian URL shortening service, Yrn.me has redesigned its logo and website and added new features. The service which launched in February 2010 was the first URL shortening service to come out of Nigeria. [Here's what it looked like before redesign]

YRN.ME, a 5-lettered domain name better spoken as “Yarn Me” (Nigerian slang word for “tell me”) can shorten up to 2,000 characters length of web addresses to merely 20 characters. (Oh, by the way, it has already shortened over 2300 links so far). Not bad for a service in a saturated space!

New Features

Thumbnails and Page Titles: When you shrink links, the service now gets the link title, description and thumbnail snap of the page.

Monthly/Hourly Stats: This feature makes the your link stats more clearer in graphs and you can also see stats in hourly or monthly report.

Folder Organisation: You can now organise links in folders so that you can refer back to old links faster. It also lets you put all articles in a folder, e.g My Articles

Notification Control: This new feature lets you control whether to receive timely upgrade and related emails about Yrn.me or not.

Yrn.me has since been adopted by Nigerian web users, but has yet to cause a disruption in the URL shortening space currently being dominated by Twitter’s default URL shortener, bit.ly

While Yrn.me offers an local alternative to shortening those long URLs, it is yet to be seen if there’ll be a general shift from other URL shorteners to this service. After 14 months of launch, the service has yet to define a revenue model.