Lady Gaga And 50 Cent’s URL Shortening Service Sounds Dumb

Does the world really need another URL shortener? One backed by Lady Gaga, 50 Cent and Pepsi, at that? One that’s run by a CEO described almost entirely by the fact that he lives on New York’s hipster-laden LES (Lower-East Side)?

I think not. But Bre.ad is coming, whether we like it or not – and if you happen to follow any celebrities or brands on Twitter and Facebook, you’re about to get more peeved on than you would if they tweeted fake cock shots.

The idea behind Bre.ad stems from celebrities and brands’ desire to keep fans on their channel, when linking them to something. Say for example Lady Gaga wants to link to a Madonna YouTube video, or in Bre.ad’s example here, 50 Cent is linking to his video with Val Kilmer (snicker), the user clicks the link and instead of being redirected straight away, they instead stare at a new splash page that not only displays a preview of where the link’s going to take you after five seconds, but also the original tweet. As Betabeat.com says, “who wants to click a link, only to spend five seconds, an eternity in web time, staring at the same tweet against a billboard background, before landing on the actual link?”

It’ll be interesting to see if any celebrities and brands other than what’s mentioned here actually sign up to Bre.ad. For the users, however, it will be a case of how many offending celebrities they can unfollow or unlike in those five long seconds. [Bre.ad via BeatBeat]