Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here's What It Means
A little startup called Bit.ly has unseated TinyURL as the default link shortening service on Twitter. This isn't just about shortening links, though. "The truth about Bit.ly," enterprise software analyst James Governor said today, "is that it's not a URL shortener, it's a trend management and metrics platform."
The key idea behind the Web is that pages are connected through hypertext links. Google changed the world and made money beyond anyone's wildest dreams by analyzing those connections between pages. It was a simple proposition, at its core: the more a page is linked to, the more authoritative it is. The web isn't just pages anymore, though. Now the web also includes people as a fundamental factor to take into consideration.
People share links to pages. By email, on Facebook, on Twitter and through countless other methods. The company that does the best job analyzing that sharing activity and creating a compelling user experience based on it is likely to become a very big deal. Companies like ShareThis, AddThis and Cli.gs are already making big plays in pulling data out of social sharing. Bit.ly made a major move in this direction today as well.
We don't want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it's brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web. Bit.ly shortens links so they are easier to share, like TinyURL. The service creates a redirect from a short Bit.ly link out to a longer link on any web page. Allong the way the service analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it.
Today Bit.ly quietly became the new default link shortening service for Twitter. Neither company would tell us much about the transition but Twitter did indicate that Bit.ly was chosen primarily because of its superior reliability. TinyURL is notorious for downtime, which is a real killer when it comes to redirecting services. Link redirection services have enough ugly warts already that going down is just not acceptable. [Note, if you're interested in the business side of things - Twitter and Bit.ly also have some common investors, BetaWorks. BetaWorks is also a Tweetdeck investor. The group's stock in Twitter is very small though and can't explain the whole partnership.]
What Bit.ly Could Make Possible
Once Bit.ly has been put to enough use, and today's news will likely be a big part of that happening, you'll be able to ask it questions like: within the last hour, what are the five hottest web pages about President Obama's budget? What social networks are sharing links to my web page the most today? What are ornithologists on Twitter most interested in this week?
The columns and rows here are semantic key terms on pages shared, method of sharing used (Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.), number of click-throughs, time and person who created the original shortcut. There's a whole lot you can do when you have that kind of information about a link. Bit.ly says its API isn't quite there yet, but it's close.
Scaling Bit.ly
As you can imagine, scaling is a serious issue. Last week Bit.ly decoded short links for 50 million clicks, only about half of which were from Twitter - about 10% were shared on Facebook. That was up from 15 million just 5 weeks ago. Becoming the default URL shortener for Twitter should send those numbers through the roof. Real time metrics and latency on this kind of scale take time and money to get a handle on. The company says it has five layers of redundancy built already to make sure that Bit.ly doesn't go down.
A mind blowing number of links will now be sent by Twitter users, through Bit.ly and back into Twitter again. Twitter may or may not be planning on taking advantage of all of this information. The company tends to keep things pretty simple, acting as a platform for other people to innovate on top of.
We fully expect to see Bit.ly take advantage of this increased flow. And we expect to see many of the countless other startups building value on top of data gleaned from Twitter to do so as well, from Tweetmeme to Tweepz to Twazzup. Maybe even some startups that will have less silly names! This is serious stuff.
Publishing the metrics of sharing on the social web is something that is very fairly compared to indexing the pages of the web and analyzing the links between them. We may not find the next Google in Bit.ly or the services built on top of it, but something very important is afoot.
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When I use URL shorteners, I like is.gd or ow.ly just because I can squeeze in an extra character or two in my tweets. I would suspect that tweetdeck users and the like feel the same way.
I guess my question is this: what is the advantage that bit.ly has over other URL shorteners that have shorter names?
Bryan, analytics - that's what. Individual users might prefer one less charecter but publishing platforms prefer analytics and will likely choose bit.ly just like Twitter did today.
Analytics, analytics, analytics. Precisely - or should I say precise.ly (sorry).
Thanks for the nice write up on Bit.ly! btw, about the time this went to live, Nick over at Tweetmeme was showing me stats on Bit.ly doing the official passing over there of TinyURL.
All in all, quite a successful Bit.ly day.
Rex
Bit.ly Community Mgr.
I am waiting for FriendFeed to start sharing analytics for their ff.im URL shortner. They did the OAuth integration with Twitter yesterday and given that a lot of people CC: their FriendFeed to Twitter, it would be nice if they could start competing against bit.ly and tr.im by providing analytics and API around ff.im.
missing the betaworks relation in terms of reasons for the move.
Thomas, that's true. I decided to focus more on the technology here and what the consequences could be than on the business why end of things. I'll add a note about that though.
Thanks for the great post.
I think this is very important for online marketers as there are very few reliable ways to measure the spread of specific page links via social media.
Agencies and/or marketing consultants who figure out how to use the analytics to provide a real return on social media "investment" will be well ahead of the curve.
As always, the larger challenge for marketers will be to translate page views and proliferation via social media into concrete results, whether measured by awareness benchmarks or conversion to actual transactions.
I am very excited about this. TinyURL was good 5 years ago but times have changed and Bit.ly is in the lead. I just hope they can handle the load.
Great article :)
Marshall,
Great article. Good analysis, and as usual, good writing. Sorry this is a little off topic, but it's refreshing to read a good tech article these days. GigaOm had an article a few weeks back on Twitter Jumping the Shark. I so badly wanted to post a comment asking folks to come up with a list of Tech blogs that have recently jumped the shark. I think RRW is heading in the other direction!
Cheers,
Byron
I value the analytics, and can also understand investment proximity played a role in this. It's an improvement.
I'm disappointd because I prefer tr.im, however, as their stats are more elegant and their Mac Dashboard widget is useful. Here's a recent video tour I did:
» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvxyKGkuoXY
I just noticed something that I didn't see the first time I read it:
How did that sentence get passed the first draft? I don't want to argue that it's a terrible sentence, but I think I already did. They shorten URLs and track the traffic that uses them. That's it. Tone it down. Stupid statements like this make me want to hate the company, but I refuse to fall for your overstatement of the year! R E F U S E!
FantasySP - thanks for reading the post twice! :) I don't think that's a stupid statement. I draw an analogy between the way Google indexed the static web and links between pages on one hand and how Bit.ly is indexing the shared web via social media now. But they do more than "shorten URLs and track the traffic that uses them" - they also use the Calais semantic analysis engine to pick out the key concepts discussed in the pages, and they serve up traffic data in real time. That's pretty hot stuff. Real time semantic and traffic analysis of socially shared content? It doesn't get much hotter than that these days. Does it?
For what it's worth - I tend to make a lot of OMFG statements here on RWW, maybe you hadn't noticed. That's becuase I think we're living in a crazy disruptive time right now where technology is changing really fast and is going to have huge consequences. So I get excited. I don't think that's wrong. :)
Marshall, are you saying Hootsuite / ow.ly *can't* do analytics, or just that it doesn't yet?
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky
I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.
Will there be any money deal involving?
This certainly Confirms My Nov '08 Prediction and call for a tinyURL boycott: http://is.gd/9gaR
My Next prediction, and advisory move for Twitter, would be to acquire a URL shortener to complement @Twitter service offerings. Natural move, right? (http://is.gd/xix2)
I'm not too surprised with the move, considering bit.ly was raved by the New York Times earlier this week.
The bigger question is why Twitter, Inc. is going with a third-party service instead of investing in their own short URL, e.g. http://twitter.com/blah or http://tw.tr/blah or some variant.
I tried bit.ly and found it painfully slow when loading links. Speed and usability is more important to me than analytics which is why I use another URL shortening service.
I'd be interested to see how quickly bit.ly beats tinyURL in terms of popularity now that Twitter uses it as its default URL shortener.
Ari, it's a non-trivial endeavor. I'm not surprised Twitter is using a third party specializing in this. I'd be surprised if they did otherwise.
Ari, FF did, invest in ff.im for own urls; now if only I could convince them to put it to full use, as in http://ff.im/2uBFP
Posted by: ianf ⌘
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May 6, 2009 10:27 PM
Can someone answer for me why Bit.ly is better than Tr.im? Tr.im does analytics, too, and its URL is shorter.
I'd like to know, before I consider switching.
URL shortening provides traffic tracking, but the introduction of such concentrated points of failure will come back to haunt us in a few years when the disappearance of a service takes millions of links down with it. I am not sure that the traffic tracking is worth it - I would rather let the web retain its integrity.
Even within the current rule of the 140 characters format there are other ways to squeeze an URL into a microblogging entry. For example, using HTML in a microblogging entry and applying the 140 characters length restriction only to the visible text would let users put URLs of arbitrary length behind a HREF tag. Is that too simple ? To me, that would be the correct way.
I wonder why Twitter outsources to Bit.ly instead of providing internal outgoing links such as the ones used by Google in its search results. The users would get the same service and Twitter would extend its dominion at the expense of its current coopetitors.
Do any of these shorteners produce the same URL for duplicate links being shortened. Actually, WTH hasn't Twitter created it's own so that content would always stay integrated? And links could be cached a la Google search giving the links permanent results and Twitter search some juice. www.twit.tr?
Posted by: Gregg Scott
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May 7, 2009 12:36 AM
Great: 2 companies without a business model partner.
Most partnerships have the intention to make more revenue and profit.
Ok we do use Bit.ly for our Tweets as long as it is free use.
I really wonder if bit.ly will be able to support the traffic they will get.
@Gregg, when Twitter sells to Google (or MSFT), it'll be left to the buyer's engineers to figure this sort of thing out. I think people are still confusing Twitter with a technology company... :) (It's really all about social psychology and smart branding)
Posted by: Alex Schleber
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May 7, 2009 2:46 AM
Is it possible to link the Twitter-auto bit.ly's to my Bit.ly account?
I've been using bit.ly manually on my corporate twitter posts for quite a while. By entering the API key into Splitweet, it would automatically shorten URLs that way and link it to my account.
Is there any chance of posts shorted automatically via twitter.com being linked to your own bit.ly account, for easy tracking? Users could pop their API key into their twitter settings page.
Social Nerdia loves bit.ly
http://bit.ly/socialnerdia
I think bit.ly and dig will emerge as the standards for short links as communities lean more heavily on the wisdom of crowds for this new form of content discovery. Levels of authority, relevance and trust will growingly need to be clear to keep click through rates high. High volume communities that experience link-jacking and malware will click with caution - event from trusted friends in network. I see the opportunity for them to be the evolution of services like Technorati and search in general.
Tangent question: What perception or baggage do you think there is with so many service taking on the .ly or Libya domain extension? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ly
Great analysis, Marshall. As a marketer, I'm a big fan of bit.ly's analytics and all the fun stuff I can do with their APIs. Using their APIs saves me a lot of time whenever I have to produce reports on social media outreach efforts.
Bit.ly, to my mind, is the best out URL shortener out there right now, so I agree that Twitter has chosen wisely.
Not sure how the plan to monetize this service. The problem with most affiliate programs and internet ads, etc. these days is people are too net-savvy to "fall" for them.
This service probably go bankrupt before twitter, because at least twitter has investors to keep them alive. Well, 301 redirects don't really use any bandwith, so maybe they'll be able to keep afloat for the time being. They're going to need one hell of a server farm though.
Who would invest in a url shortener service? I mean twitter is changing services like every month it seems. I could write everything that bit.ly does in PHP or Python within a day or two, analytics included! It's not like they really innovated anything.
Maybe I'm pessimistic.
http://bit.ly/etogre
Great post, Marshall. It will be interesting what/if Google does something about this grassroots effort to make the web more semantic AND real-time. I just can't imagine Google just sitting around doing nothing. Perhaps it's time Google made Twitter an offer or two?
@Ed Borasky: Hootsuite does this, but its shortener uses frames. And we all know how much we hate frames! http://technestreport.com/blog/2009/05/18/tnrp-35/
i thought they only use tinyurl?
why doesn't twitter analyse the shortened URLs and replace it *themselves* with their own shortener???
this gets round problems with third party failures, ensures they can de-spam, and avoids the great link-rot-apocalypse!
it'd be too easy for one of these shortened services to start injecting an interstitial adverts page knowing that users have committed a huge number of short URLs and can't avoid them!
if *I* were twitter, I'd not only start de-obfuscating new shortened URLs from known services but I'd also be post-processing old tweets.
there's no reason why they can't present the tweeter with the original text and original shortener, but allow readers to choose to see the target URL or choose twitter's shortened URL (which might be preferable to avoid going to an unsafe URL).
We don't want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it's brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web. Bit.ly shortens links so they are easier to share, like TinyURL. The service creates a redirect from a short Bit.ly link out to a longer link on any web page. Allong the way the service analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it.
"What are ornithologists on Twitter most interested in this week?" Very important, indeed.
1) Bit.ly will make money selling analytics, not necessarily to those using bit.ly links, but to those who want to see for example what's hot on the net. EG, an entertainment producer may decide who to hire for a gig based on a performer's growing or decreasing Internet "hotness". Hopefully, folks with a real life don't give the Internet too much sway.
2) While those who click on a bit.ly link are not giving away personal information (except their IP address which can be traced to a home and browser and operating system and visitation date/time and ...), they are contributing to the collective Googleness (profit from "anonymous") of the Internet :) (can't be avoided on today's Internet, and that's not as bad as malicious websites that don't tell you what they're doing :)
3) Bit.ly, and other URL shortening websites should post a disclaimer about what information they are collecting from clickers to be on the up-and-up!
SoCalDude
What is difference between voizle and bit.ly??
both are providing u analytic service.. from where and who are accessing their URL..
Voizle even provides u.. sitemeter and link exchange feature too...
so how do compare http://www.voizle.com and http://bit.ly ?
Thanks
Romeo
http://www.crazyfriendz.com
I am very excited about this.
I've been using bit.
Bit.ly, to my mind, is the best out URL shortener out there right now, so I agree that Twitter has chosen wisely.
I've been using bit
i thought they only use tinyurl
Yes there are tones of services like this… i prefer http://smal.ly they offer me full geo statistics and analytics…
One day someone will develop some technology that makes these short URLs irrelevant, right? Bit.ly Pro looks quite interesting though.