Abrevio - The easiest way to share a link
Back in 2015, we were working on some IoT related web apps and we needed to test the changes on multiple phones. Those phones included different Android (Samsung, Motorola, etc) and iPhones.
Every time we did a new change, and we wanted to try it fast on the devices, it was a nightmare. Copying the URLs and writing them down on every phone.
We tried using URL shorteners, that was making it a little faster to type, but for sure the screen keyboards and the text predictions were not helping at all!
We thought, it should be an easier way to share these links.
Then is when Abrevio was born…
The idea is that instead of creating short URLs by using random characters, it was using regular words from the dictionary and just putting them together.
For example, a link could be reduced to “dog house”. And when you write dog and house in Abrevio, it will re-direct you to the correct URL.
That made things really easy for us, links were easy to remember. Before entering a meeting, you knew what was the link to the latest version.
Or when you needed to share a link over the phone, it was really easy, instead of spelling every single character you just had to say the words!
We started using this internally and we made it public for some time. Many people from different countries shared links using Abrevio during that time.
We even had a CLI tool to generate the links on the console: