Good.ly is an intriguing and unusual URL shorterner with a charitable difference.

Social network junkies that have a Mother-Tereasa-like bent may be very interested in this service.

Good.ly has several things going for it, namely a sustainable business model, a diverse affiliate network and, importantly, the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from giving.

URL shorteners are the soup-du-jour at the moment, and good.ly’s kryptonite will undoubtedly be competition and user choice. We also need to ask: is good.ly doing a good enough job of establishing an easily understood identity and message for itself?

.


.

You’re going to have to bear with me here, because this is not really one review – its actually a review of two different services, bound together by the miracles of computer science. Good.ly offers kind hearted folks the opportunity to make money for charities simply by shortening a URL and getting their twitter followers or facebook friends to click on their good.ly shortened link. Sounds simple? Okay – hang on tight: here’s where it gets a bit confusing.

Before we get to good.ly, we need to take a look at a website called Skimlinks (www.skimlinks.com). If you aren’t familiar with skimlinks, they’re an affiliate network that automatically creates commission-payable links based on whatever it is you may want to sell on your site, blog or twitter acccount with a huge range of merchants including the big guns like Amazon, Dell and eBay. Someone clicks your link, buys whatever it is you were promoting and voila! Juicy commission checks headed your way.

Okay, with me so far? Great.

Now, let’s introduce good.ly with an example. Joe, a hard working internaut from Woolongong, Australia is really into comic books. One day Joe finds a super-rare Spiderman vs. Archie mint condition comic on eBay. He’s excited and wants to tweet the world and tell everyone about his new purchase. Joe heads over to the eBay seller’s URL and shortens the URL with good.ly (he’s already installed the bookmarklet in his browser, by the way). After tweeting the good.ly link, four of Joe’s friends follow the link and one buys another comic of the eBay seller.

Here’s the cool bit:

As soon as Joe shortened the URL with good.ly, Skimlinks (remember them?) automatically creates an affiliate link for the shortened URL that provides a commission if anything is purchased from the eBay seller. Since Joe has donated his link, charities pick up the bulk of the commission, with the rest going back to good.ly.

Even though it took me a few minutes to get my head around what was actually going on with this service, there is no doubt that good.ly is an interesting startup. Firstly, let’s get real: no one really cares what service shortens their URL, be it bit.ly, tinyURL or one of the other dozen guys doing effectively the same thing. People just want a URL that isn’t going to kill their tweet characters. Since the other URL shorteners don’t provide any other benefit apart from a short URL, the user isn’t losing anything by migrating to good.ly, with the added benefit of doing “their little bit” for a random charity. Of course, good.ly still provides a shortened URL even if the original link isn’t part of the Skimlinks affiliate network. In that case, no money is made for anybody.

The interesting thing that I noticed about good.ly is that this is not a non-profit startup! Not to take anything away from the charitable side of the service, good.ly is also laughing all the way to the bank by taking a whopping 45% of the commissions earned. While they are upfront about this, the fact remains: the commissions earned – if this thing takes off – will certainly cover much more than server maintenance, marketing and beer money. Now before you cry “Scrooge!” on me, this is actually a good thing: the more viable a business model good.ly has, the longer it will be able to pass donations back to a variety of needy charities.

The major challenge for good.ly is to get their message out in a clearer way. In this world of the five-second attention span, users simply won’t invest the effort to figure the out what the service is doing past the basic URL shortening feature..I’d certainly like to see a guage showing “how much we made for charity” on the front page  to accompany the social aspect “What’s good.ly today” to raise a bit more awareness and buzz with users.

People love buying stuff. People love telling other people about their stuff that they’ve bought. People also have good – if often unrealized – intentions of supporting charity. People love short URLs. Put all that together? A promising recipe for success.

You can visit good.ly and start raising money for charity (and good.ly and skimlinks ) by clicking here.

Click on any thumbnail to launch the gallery.

.

If you liked this review, please share it with your friends and leave a comment. Thanks!