The recy.me code you see on Recommendi is a short URL to aid people who wish to type in the address into a browser. “Recommend-me” – geddit?
Every Recommendi client is assigned a unique recy.me code containing 4 or 5 characters that redirect customers to the survey (also a unique Recommendi QR-Code as well). This means customers without barcode recognition on their smart-phones only have to type a maximum of 12 or 13 characters to get to a survey. This is important, as big fingers on small phones often make mistakes.
We looked at using one of the existing services like bit.ly but found they didn’t meet our needs. Amazingly, none of these services are geared toward using mobiles. They require a combination of Upper and lower case letters (example http://bit.ly/bdnVwx = www.Recommendi.com) which is not easy to a) remember and b) type correctly into a tiny keyboard. Lack of control of their system was another concern, and also the issue that users are not sure at what address they will reach.
So for that reason we designed our own URL shortener. We based it on Base32 using the work of Douglas Crockford, and used 4 or 5 characters in our code, which in theory gives us 32 million combinations. In practice, we found we had to be bit more careful and write a filter to remove certain codes. You can imagine that random combinations of letters and numbers can result in some pretty funny (and sometimes rude) words eg. “5hip” “f4rt” (well, you get the idea). But the several million left over is probably enough for our most aggressive current business projections.
You can also be sure that the only site you will reach with a recy.me/1234 click is a Recommendi.com survey, which we know will be safe for people and computers. You can try this real example here. http://recy.me/r51x
At some stage we may allow Recommendi “premium” clients to claim their own name in the recy.me code: example: recy.me/ajax.
In summary: The recy.me code is designed to be human-memorable, easy to type and safe to use. We hope you will use it widely.
Factfans: The .me part of the domain is Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Montenegro. (we’re based in the Netherlands, our servers are on Amazon EC2 in Ireland). The 5 digits? I remembered from my Cringely that 7 digits is the about the maximum that most people can remember.
