URL Shortening Twitters To Success
Not being a great ‘ideas’ man myself it’s never actually happened to me - but it must be really annoying when you develop something that you think is the bees-knees, you’re positive that it’s a real winner but then it doesn’t really ‘catch the wave’! How disappointing must that be? And then, maybe when you’ve just about given up hope, something else becomes hugely popular and almost by accident, your ‘killer application’ is a perfect-fit, it comes of age and takes off big-time.
IMHO such is the current role of the URL shortening companies: if you’ve never heard of URL shortening/condensing, then you’ll need to be aware that these companies developed an application that took really long ugly URLs and hugely reduced them in length-size. They’ve been around for a while (TinyURL for example has been around since 2002) but there was never that much of a compelling interest in their services but then … along comes the current social media behemoth Twitter with its twit-posting service that’s predicated on limiting the number of characters in every post to 140 characters.
So there you have it – a massively popular posting service where character saving isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ but it’s an absolute must that’s suddenly found it’s place in the market. Twitter have aligned themselves with TinyURL as their default solution but there’s loads of others out there and who knows which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Well look no further! That much read Internet icon Danny Sullivan has posted a detailed analysis after reviewing various services and how they stacked up in a variety of features and you can read it all here (for reference I’ve shown the long and short URLs).
http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204 (86 chars)
http://bit.ly/ZuUw (18 chars)
In terms of what’s the best URL shortening service to follow, I’ll add no further commentary to what Danny’s written apart from to give personal added focus to the passage he writes on Stability. If you want the ‘little URL’ in your Tweet-post to live on, there’s little point in aligning yourself to a ‘shoestring’ company that’s not going to give adequate support because as Danny says, “Nothing is more annoying than tweeting a link using a URL shortener and then having people tweet back at you that the link isn’t working, because the URL shortening service has gone down.” … or if the service just suddenly shuts down for whatever reason and all your links are ‘toast’!
Ultimately, you’ll make your own individual choices and Danny’s review is fantastically helpful in that regard. There’s little doubt that TinyURL has got the wind in its sails at the moment, although personally I’m a devotee of the newer service Bit.ly.
So URL shortening has at last Twittered to its place in the sun – well done to the innovators for holding on: rewarded at last!
Comments
6 Responses to “URL Shortening Twitters To Success”
Leave a Reply
11th August 2009 – there are always casualties in war! An early casualty of the URL shortening war is tr.im (see the following announcement from their website).
—————
tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.
—————-
So by Twitter acclamation, the winner of the URL shortening war is bit.ly!
Dateline: 14th December 2009 12:31:00 PM
As if they hadn’t got their fingers in enough pies …. this morning, ‘G’ launched updated versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner that offer a new URL shortening service called the Google URL Shortener. Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links directly.
‘G’ goes on to say that Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner [at present] but if the service proves useful [as if] they may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.
So that’s it for everybody else in the URL shortening game – I suspect! They’re dooooooooooooomed!
Further to Macklin’s post about Google getting into the URL shortening game and blowing everybody else away … well, maybe not!
Bit.ly is fighting back by announcing an even shorter URL service. If current URL shorteners for cutting Twitter posts and the like down to size aren’t aggressive enough for you, then check out Bit.ly’s new service, which saves a precious two characters per link.
Bit.ly is currently handling over two billion clicks a month, and says its new j.mp service – four characters, as opposed to the previous monstrous six – is part of a suite of offerings that should appeal to microbloggers and businesses alike.
That includes Bit.ly Pro, which allows publishers to create their own URL shorteners, and Bitly.tv, a video aggregation site that highlights the most popular YouTube videos shared using Bit.ly links.
You can check it all out on their Blog:
http://blog.bit.ly/post/287873179/bit-ly-pro-bit-ly-labs-and-bitly-tv
Now they’re all at it …YouTube has decided its URL is too long, and is now offering its users the chance to trim them down. The move clearly comes as the world starts to cut down its URLs to use in the likes of Twitter.
Speaking on the Official YouTube Blog, the video-hosting site said:
“We’ve just launched youtu.be as a shortener for YouTube video links – and nothing but YouTube links – so you can rest assured that when you see a link with this URL, you are indeed about to click on a YouTube video. Also, because the link contains the ID of the video you’re going to see, developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time.”
So there you have it – if you’re interested in chopping letters out of web addresses from YouTube, then just use AutoShare from your YouTube account synched with something like Twitter, and the URL will be snipped.
If you want to do it manually then simply switch the ‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=’ ….. element of the URL with http://youtu.be/ and you’ll be sorted.
Just in case you miss it: there’s an announcement about Twitter and its own URL shortener service. One of the many informational postings can be found here: had to happen!
http://www.nma.co.uk/3014401.article?cmpid=NMAE01&cmptype=newsletter
Twitter is rolling out its own URL shortener, akin to services such as Bit.ly, to improve user experience and tie into its ad propositions.
The micro-blogging site automatically shortens URLs within direct messages as part of a security check to prevent the spread of malware or phishing. It plans to expand this to all tweets, starting with a select group of employees. Some third-party Twitter applications already use other URL shortener services such as Bit.ly or TinyURL.
Twitter said that while this will help to increase security on the site and make it easier for people to use, it’ll also enable the company to use data from the links to feed into its Resonance algorithm and Promoted Tweets platform to ensure paid-for ads are more relevant to users.
Sean Garrett, head of communications at Twitter, said, “In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm – the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We’re also looking to provide services that make use of this data – an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.”
According to Twitter, once the shortener service is rolled out to all members over the next few months, all links, whether sent from Twitter or a third-party app, will be changed to start with t.co. It’s also looking at ways of displaying links as page titles or simplified and shortened versions of the original link, which would retain the title of the original website.
Hello, I like your blog URL Shortening Twitters To Success EASIserv and have saved it on Mister-Wong
!
bye,
Ricardo Leavell