ReadWriteWeb

Twitter may become the heavyweight in analytics of its own content, boxing out rivals HootSuite, bit.ly and Klout.

As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, Twitter plans to launch sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.

Anderson, who made the comments last weekend at a social media conference at Columbia University in New York, said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. Twitter already offers similar services to its advertisers.

If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.

According to bitly, the half-life of a link isn't measured in weeks or days, it's about three hours on most social networks. Does it matter where the link is posted? Absolutely. For the most bang for your social media buck, YouTube is the winner.

The half-life of a link is the amount of time it takes for a link to get half the clicks it will ever receive. The company looked at the half-life of 1,000 popular bitly links posted to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to see whether it matters where a link is posted.

If you want something more capable than Hootsuite to handle your social media marketing, then you might want to take a closer look at what Pardot's Marketing Automation service provides. The marketing automation platform has gotten some new social media features that complement its existing tools for handling CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener and analytics service from New York incubator Betaworks, has developed a software developers kit (SDK) that leverages the forthcoming deep Twitter integration in iOS5. The SDK will enable app developers to automatically share links on Twitter using branded URLs. ReadWriteWeb, for example, shares short links on Twitter automatically using rww.to. Employing the Bit.ly SDK our iPhone app will automatically do the same with the new Twitter iOS features.

The SDK is only available to developers who have signed an NDA with Apple, but it's available to check out on request. It's enough to make a person wonder what other kinds of APIs and SDKs will be built on top of the new Twitter features in iOS5. Twitter is a great platform, but there's no reason to believe that multiple layers of platforms will be placed on top of iOS, Twitter, location data, URL shorteners and more.

According to this report from Symantec's MessageLabs, spammers have escalated their sophistication with URL misdirection. It works like this:

First, spammers set up a new domain that they intend to use for their evil purposes, but let it lie dormant for a few months. This is to avoid the detection of services that look for recently created domains.

URL shortener Bit.ly launched a new mobile site today and it's a pretty good combination of quick, easy and powerful. If you're browsing the web on your phone and you want to share a link with someone - why not jump over to Bit.ly mobile and shorten it first? That way you can easily get all kinds of analytics on who clicked through it, where they were and more.

It's frustrating, though, that the company didn't just improve its Bit.ly sidebar experience on mobile devices. If you're willing to grab and use the javascript from the Bit.ly sidebar button (we've embedded it below for your convenience) - you'll be a lot happier in the long run. How many clicks does it take to shorten and put on your clipboard a link with the new Bit.ly mobile site? 13. With the sidebar javascript? 4! That sounds like an obvious choice to me.

As we profiled in our Never Mind the Valley series last month, New York is increasing its stronghold on the east coast startup scene. The city's rich media and international business ecosystems make it the perfect launch pad for startups looking to leverage these markets. One other reason the city has seen successful growth of entrepreneurship is the holding company Betaworks, which shows no signs of slowing after raising $20 million from Intel, AOL, RRE Ventures and several others.

URL shortener and social media analytics service Bit.ly just announced the availability of a new domain for shortening URLs, J.mp. J.mp offers all the same features Bit.ly does, but we believe it has two advantages.

Not only is it shorter, the new name is more literally communicative of what the service does. Click on it and you will J.mp [jump] to a new link. It's nice and literal like the old classic tinyURL, though most people don't know what URLs are. J.mp is so friendly it makes Bit.ly look like a way to catch a bit-delivered virus. J.mp might be the best URL shortener name yet. How do those Bit.ly guys do it?

Updated at 12:45 PM PST with a response from Bit.ly

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.