(This guest post was written by Muhammad At-Tauhidi, corporate lawyer and entrepreneur):

I created Runt.ly as an easy way to share ad-hoc content over Twitter and other micro-blogs.  Runt.ly was designed as a “mini-blog” — for you when you have more to say then you can fit on a micro-blog but not so much that you would be inclined to create a traditional blog post for it.  Runt.ly makes it really easy to create multimedia posts that contain WYSIWYG text, photos and video that can be shared with a single short URL.  Although Runt.ly is similar to other “light-blogging” tools like Posterous or Tumblr, the focus is less on giving users their own personal homepage and more on making it easier for users to share individual pieces of content.

This “shareability” factor is becoming increasingly important as micro-blogs like Twitter take over as users’ primary social networks.  We have already begun to see the role of shareabilty in driving the explosive growth of URL shorteners like Bit.ly, and photo sharing services like TwitPic.  These applications are popular because they allow users to share things over their Twitter network in the same ways that they are accustomed to doing over email or Facebook, in spite of Twitter’s 140 character limit.  But instead of photos or video, Runt.ly is focused on allowing users to create and share short ad hoc content – jokes, recipes, poems, horoscopes, etc.  A lot of these types of content are transitory or disposal; if you wanted to share a joke or recipe with your friends, you are probably not going to post it on your blog.  If you think about Twitter’s public timeline, it is really built around this same idea of transitory messages.  So making it easier to share more of this type of content is really a natural fit for what Twitter already does.

Some examples:

Recipes: http://runt.ly/a2aubq
Jokes: http://runt.ly/3novmo, http://runt.ly/biqnjj
Short messages too long for Twitter: http://runt.ly/aqdehj
Full blog posts: http://runt.ly/jlmvuj

For the future, I am working on adding an API that will allow other applications to integrate Runt.ly with third-party applications. This could provide some really interesting functionality to things like Twitter clients that want to offer the ability for users to add messages and content that wont fit into 140 characters.  If you or someone you know has built a Twitter client that they are trying to figure out how to monetize, please get in touch!

About Me:

By day, I am a corporate lawyer who works with entrepreneurs and VC’s on financing transactions, in addition to general corporate work.  Although I work at a large law firm, I have a lifelong passion for entrepreneurship and working with startups.  Before law school I led marketing and sales at several small software companies and then co-founded an independent record label.  I started Runt.ly as a way to try my hand at something in the consumer Internet space that I could start in my spare time.

Contact Info:

Runtly: admin@runt.ly
Ballard Spahr LLP: attauhidim@ballardspahr.com