Mgnet.me: Worlds First BitTorrent Magnet URL Shortener

[Guest bigdady]

When BitTorrent magnets were hyped to become the successor to the plain old .torrent file, the entire BitTorrent community made sure that is was magnet friendly. Despite these efforts, the rest of the web didn’t take note and were left behind. Sharing magnet links with others has thus far been a dreadful experience, but Mgnet.me solves this issue.

When The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker in November of 2009, the site’s operators suggested that they might move away from .torrent files entirely in the future. Instead, magnet links would become the new standard.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time, adding that torrents may become a thing of the past.

More than a year later .torrent files are still predominantly used by the masses, but The Pirate Bay announcement did spur BitTorrent developers and site admins into action. Many torrent clients quickly added support for magnet links, and most torrent sites that didn’t already have magnets did the same.

One of the downsides to using magnets, however, is that the links are generally not easy to share. They too are long for Twitter, not clickable in most instant messaging applications and they are not very descriptive either. Mgnet.me aims to change this.

By now most people are probably familiar with URL shorteners. Services like Bit.ly can be used to shorten lengthy URLs and make them easier to share on Twitter and other platforms. However, they don’t support magnet links.

Mgnet.me is such a URL shortener, but one that’s specifically designed for converting magnet URLs into short and descriptive links.

This means that instead of this:

magnet:xt=urn:btih:&dn=Pioneer.One.S01E02.720p.x264VODO&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker

.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80%

2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80%2Fannounce

People can share the following link in chats, tweets, or on their websites. Needless to say, this makes sharing magnets easier and more convenient than ever before.

http://mgnet.me/@p1e2

People can use the service manually by copying the magnet link and shortening it with Mgnet.me, which takes just a few seconds. However, it would be even better if torrent sites added support for this magnet URL shortener on their websites.

The magnet-only search engine Sailr already implemented Mgnet.me support recently. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users of the site can generate a short magnet URL in a single click right from the search results. Other torrent sites can do the same without having to code their own shortener, with the Mgnet.me API.

Keep on sharing.

Sailr’s short magnet support