Comments on: URL Shortening Twitters To Success

By: Lem Billings

Lem Billings — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:29:56 +0000

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.

By: Earl Macklin

Earl Macklin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:23:26 +0000

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.

By: Billy Priest

Billy Priest — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 13:58:38 +0000

Further to Earl 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

By: Earl Macklin

Earl Macklin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:20:29 +0000

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!

By: Lem Billings

Lem Billings — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:10:01 +0000

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!