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?

Such is the nature of the super-fast, perhaps Real Time, social web that Bit.ly is a big part of.

You can visit J.mp and get all the same bookmarklets and tools for the new URL that you've got for Bit.ly (the "sidebar" tool is excellent). We expect that leading Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic will likely add J.mp support soon. We wonder if Twitter.com will stop transforming long links into Bit.ly links automatically (a deal that was announced this Spring) and will use J.mp instead.

In case you're curious - .mp comes from the Mariana Islands, which are just South of Japan.

There are a number of efforts in the market to create community-owned URL shorteners, with features serving developers first before the interests of private owners. Most notable among them so far is Tr.im. It would be a shame if enthusiasm for such projects was lost over one fewer letter being taken up by J.mp. That said, this new URL J.mp will likely be just the latest development from a company that's building itself into a strong market leader.

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.

URL shortening is of course important primarily because of Twitter, where links have to be shortened in order to save characters against the limit of 140 per message. This May Twitter chose to make Bit.ly its default URL shortener, replacing TinyURL. Bit.ly's marketshare in the URL shortening world became a near instant monopoly.

This is important because these URL shorteners have all kinds of data about which links on Twitter and elsewhere are getting the most click-throughs. Bit.ly is interesting because they've been building all kinds of value ads on top of that data - real time analytics, semantic analysis of the linked-to pages and more. Many people believe that Bit.ly could become one of the hottest sources of news discovery on the web, challenging now slow-looking sites like Digg.

Woodward argues that the relationship between Twitter and Bit.ly has made the URL shortening business pointless for everyone else. It was taking up a lot of his time, causing him headaches and he was feeling pressure to dedicate more time to his company's core product, the Nambu desktop client.

Last month Woodward announced he would be closing Tr.im down and a substantial number of people freaked out. The biggest concern was that all the short links that had been created would now be broken. Some developers complained that they had invested time into building services that utilized Tr.im's analytics. In response to the uproar, Woodward changed his mind. He said he'd keep the service up for some period of time, he tried to find a seller, but today he's announcing a permanent change to the nature of the product.

Woodward argues that Bit.ly and Twitter will not expose raw aggregate clickthrough data to just anyone to develop on top of. That's what the new community-owned Tr.im is going to do. Working with activity data hub provider Gnip, Tr.im will make aggregate anonymized data available in real time, for free. That means that any random developer can build something exciting on top of that stream of data, not just the selected partners of Twitter and Bit.ly.

Woodward says that if the community can take Tr.im to 5 or 10% marketshare, then it should have a good sample of the data Bit.ly is seeing in the rest of the market. Opening that data to developers in real time would then become more valuable than anything Tr.im can offer in aggregate today.

Update: We spoke with Bit.ly's John Borthwick and this is what he had to say: "I think this is great, it means there will be a future for tr.im and having more services out there is a really good thing. [Tr.im's Eric Woodward] is short on the facts though and the facts are if you look at the clicks and encodes on bit.ly in a day, 15 million yesterday for example, 60% of them are from Twitter, less than 10% come from twitter.com. It's about product iteration and adding features. [That's why Bit.ly is so popular, Borthwick argues.] Eric made a choice and bit.ly has made a different choice." Borthwick also emphasized that Bit.ly has to invest substantial resources into scaling, something that the Tr.im community will need to take very seriously if it is to grow.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [Update: After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

For publishers the service looks very cool, it includes features we haven't seen anywhere else and offers access to the huge Stumble audience.

• Real time analytics showing how many people click through your links, how many came via StumbleUpon in particular and who the most prolific "reTweeters" have been.


• Easy publishing to Twitter and Facebook, including the ability to schedule those links and messages to be pushed out at a particular time.


• "Suggested posting time" metrics, based on historical data concerning when people are most likely to click through your links.


• A handy bookmarklet that makes submission of links quick and easy.

It's interesting to note that Stumble's business model is based on publishers paying 5 cents per visitor to have pages inserted into relevant Stumble streams already. Now publishers are being encouraged not only to put their pages into Stumble for free, but are also aggressively prompted to write their own reviews of pages.

What's Not So Super

Other possible critiques of Su.pr include that the framed pages aren't pretty in mobile displays (the frame is clunky and the obscured destination URL is a bummer) and there hasn't been a Su.pr API announced, something that competitors like Bit.ly, Cli.gs and Tr.im all offer.

Stumble says they are using the right kind of redirect to keep search juice on the page that's being linked to, (Update: SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan says this is not true) but we're not sure what Su.pr will do to third party analytics services like Google's. We also question whether the "clicks" are really clicks on Su.pr; just like all URL shorteners have happen, Su.pr links are sometimes "opened" by browser extensions that peak at the full URL without readers actually clicking on them. For example, the service reported 5 clickthroughs on one of our links just 5 seconds after we sent it to Twitter. That's possible but doesn't seem terribly likely. It's a hard problem to solve and one that is much more important for publishers with tech-savvy browser extension using audiences than it is for the vast majority of the world. In tech publishing, it's not uncommon for other URL shortening services to report 1k clicks when internal analytics have only seen 700, for example.

Su.pr encourages publishers throughout its interface to promote their own content, a reality of the web publishing world that brings with it some ethical questions. The company has always flirted with these questions by serving up paid content pages inside Stumble streams without disclosing that they were paid for, something that few other widely-loved technology companies could get away with. Mega corp eBay can't be blamed for any of this as Stumble's founders recently bought the company back (which is awesome).

Perhaps the bulk of Stumble-submissions were already coming from publishers though, not from fairies touching web pages with dew-drop-dripping magic wands as we naively hoped.

We're sure Su.pr will be great for StumbleUpon and for publishers, but we'll have to see how good it is for users. Fortunately some self-correction is baked in to StumbleUpon, viewers simply vote down weak content and other people are thus likely to be served that content as they Stumble through the web. The efficacy of that self-correction may be mitigated by a substantial increase in noisy publisher content pushed into the system out of self-interest though. We'll see!

If you would like to try out Su.pr for yourself, you can use the invite code "suprrww."

It is really strange that none of the coverage we've seen today makes mention of yesterday's news that Twitter has picked Bit.ly as its new default URL shortener. Bit.ly indexes the content of links and gathers a whole lot more data. Below are three reasons we're betting that Twitter will not index the content of links itself, it will rely on Bit.ly to do it. Twitter will probably acquire Bit.ly as a result, in exchange for Twitter stock. If not Bit.ly, it will be one of a handful of other third party companies currently working behind the scenes with Twitter on this kind of search. Twitter is not going to do it all on its own, we're willing to bet on that. Update: After publishing this post we have been sent additional information illustrating just how close the Twitter/Bit.ly relationship already is.

Many people asked yesterday why Twitter was choosing an outside party at all to shorten its links. Why not do that in-house? The most obvious answer would be that it's very hard work to reliably redirect millions upon millions of links every day. Why should Twitter do it? Bit.ly is redirecting 50 million clicks a week right now, up from only 15 million per week just 5 weeks ago. Now that the relationship with Twitter is as close as it is (Twitter was the source of only about 50% of the traffic through bit.ly before) we can expect that number to grow even faster. We hear that last month Bit.ly got off of Amazon servers and is fast adding servers of their own. Update: One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity now tells us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change."

Five weeks ago we wrote about Bit.ly receiving venture funding from some of the hottest investors in the web business: investors like Ron Conway, an early Google investor, Mitch Kapor (the inventor of Lotus) and rock star startup investor Jeff Clavier. Bit.ly's former parent company, BetaWorks, got money from Tim O'Reilly, one of the fathers of Web 2.0 O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. They took this money in part because they needed it. It's not easy to do what Bit.ly does. There's good reason for Twitter to not reproduce that work.

If it makes sense to have a specialist team redirect the links, it makes even more sense to have someone else indexing the content of those linked pages. Remember, Twitter was started as a group SMS service. They keep it as simple as possible over there and let others do the most complicated work. If there was ever a startup that does not suffer from "Not Built Here" disease (meaning they can't integrate other peoples' work) Twitter is a great example.

We believe this is going to be a business deal more than a technology play. Even Santosh Jayaram, the Googler turned Twitter exec that started this whole discussion last night, has an MBA with a resume full of business development jobs. He's being described as "Operations at Twitter" but his LinkedIn profile lists his current position as VP of Business Operations.

Twitter may be processing its own trends data on site now, but that's analysis of very short bursts of text and it's using technology built by a startup the company acquired - Summize. We expect them to do the same thing with linked-page indexing and analysis.

2. Indexing Full Text Is Not That Interesting

One of the reasons that Twitter is so interesting is that with a 140 character limit, every word counts. When it comes to the pages people share links to on Twitter, that's not necessarily the case. Enter semantic analysis of those pages, something Bit.ly is currently doing with the help of the Reuters Calais system. Bit.ly serves up links to Calais and gets back a list of the keywords and concepts that the linked-to pages are actually about. Think of it as machine-performed auto tagging with subject keywords. This structured data is much more interesting than the mere presence of search terms in a full text search.

Bit.ly has had semantics in its sites since day one. It's also very strong in real-time statistical analysis. It's reminiscent of the Twitter-acquired search engine Summize, which was grounded in a background of sentiment analysis and brought real-time to the game as well. We wouldn't be surprised to see sentiment analysis and semantics, both of which are very hard to do, become a part of the API that Twitter offers outside developers in the future.

3. The Business Connections Are There

Several people have mentioned in the last 24 hours that Bit.ly and Twitter have common investors. Bit.ly came from a small New York incubator called Betaworks, which is also an investor in the most popular Twitter client Tweetdeck. Betaworks was also an investor in Summize, the search engine that Twitter acquired. That means Betaworks owns some stock in Twitter as well. That stock is probably relatively small, not enough to make a deal happen but more than enough to facilitate introductions between friends.

The actual story behind the scenes is no doubt much more complicated than this. Bit.ly's John Borthwick told us this morning that Bit.ly is working on part of this development but Twitter is too. Several other companies are testing some kind of API program already, so it may not be Bit.ly or just Bit.ly that becomes the center of this story long term. We've heard in the last week from more than one company working on something like this with Twitter and Bit.ly would be far and away the cheapest of the candidates for Twitter to pick up in terms of the relatively small venture financing they've taken.

OneRiot is one of those other companies. They will unveil a related but broader technology early next week (watch this space) and they too have an investor in common with Twitter (Spark Capital).

Competition over the deep real time search space has got to be heating up for all the players, though. "Four search companies have approached us over the past eight weeks," Bit.ly's Borthwick tells us.

Disclosure: Reuters Calais, the company doing semantic analysis for bit.ly and other companies, is an RWW sponsor.

TinyURL has also allowed incomprehensible amounts of value, both in terms of technology and in terms of money, to sit on the table unclaimed. For years. Now a group of some of the web's hottest investors are betting a few million dollars that a smart TinyURL competitor called Bit.ly can take advantage of being the conduit through which millions of people visit sites of interest to them.

We reviewed Bit.ly when the project launched last July and urged readers to use this service to shorten their long links instead of other services like TinyURL. Why do we care what service people use? Because we're fans of innovation and Bit.ly is aiming to be a platform for innovation like TinyURL should have been. If web 2.0 is about democratizing publishing, the next step is machine leveraging all the resulting data.

The Bit.ly Magic

What does Bit.ly do that's so special? They use all the data they see and make it available to third party developers who want to build on top of it. They keep track of the clickthrough numbers and can tell you what the hottest links on the web are at any time. See this @bitlynow Twitter account for one display of that information. Bit.ly says it resolved 20 million distinct URLs last week. That's the beginning of a really large database.

Bit.ly also uses Reuters Calais to extract semantic terms out of the pages that shortcuts are created to. That's valuable information. Want to see the most popular web pages that talk about Dancing With The Stars, or the Federal Stimulus Package, or some other topic, in the last 30 minutes? Somebody wants to, you'd better believe, and that's the kind of real-time information that the Bit.ly API aims to make available. (Disclosure: Calais is an RWW sponsor.)

We've had some concerns about the clickthrough numbers that Bit.ly has reported but the company says they are going through a list of reporting sources that give them problems and eliminating them one at a time. The company says it is now reporting real-time traffic stats that are within 10% of what Google Analytics reports much later. We've been watching the numbers improve in accuracy when it comes to our numbers and can confirm that they are getting much better.

A number of people have looked at today's news and thought it was ridiculous that a link shortening business could raise $2 million in funding. We don't think it's ridiculous at all. Show us a service that can report in real time how many people are visiting millions of pages around the web and what those pages are about, that exposes that data in an API, and we'll show you a platform we're very excited to see work.

In tests, the reason that the TinyURLs were able to be used in this way is because the pages they masked were not at the domain level, but were rather sub-pages of a domain marked as "safe." This actually points to a weakness in the Safe Browsing feature and not really a security risk in the TinyURL service in and of itself. Because Safe Browsing only ranks sites at the domain level, infected sub-pages will always be ranked as "non-malicious" as long as the domain is categorized as "safe."

TinyURL isn't the only service being abused in this way. Other URL-shortening services mentioned in the article include bit.ly, w3t.org and is.gd. However, during their research, the firm also found bit.ly being used by the same cybercriminals. Both TinyURL and bit.ly were notified and the malicious links were removed.

Earlier this month, when Bit.ly originally launched their Firefox plugin, we were excited to see how it exposed data like clickthroughs, user profiles, and the expanded URL in a small pop-up window that would appear just by hovering your mouse over the various links on Twitter.

Now Bit.ly's plugin lets you hover over the "in reply to" links on Twitter to see the original message that started the Twitter conversation. This is extremely useful for anyone who uses the Twitter homepage to interact with the service instead of a desktop application.

Why Enhance Twitter.com?

Although when it comes to Twitter, we prefer using desktop software, like TweetDeck for example, we often don't have any other option but to use the Twitter homepage. Thanks to Twitter's hard API limits, heavy use of our desktop programs ends up leaving them stalled out once those limits are reached. That has us constantly switching back from our desktop programs to the homepage itself - a homepage whose simplicity is lacks many of the features we have come to rely on in our Twitter apps.

That's why it's important to keep your eye on developments like this and others that add additional functionality to the Twitter homepage itself. Besides Bit.ly's must-have browser plugin, we also recommend using the relatively new Power Twitter Firefox plugin which adds even more features to Twitter's interface including search, inline videos and photos, Facebook status updates, and more.

The combination of both plugins can turn Twitter.com into a homepage that's a worthy competitor to whatever desktop app you currently use - in fact, you may end up even preferring to use use the homepage as your primary Twitter "client!" If you want to try Bit.ly's new and improved browser plugin, you can download it from here: http://bit.ly/bitlyFirefox. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_improved_bitly_plugin_adds_functionality_to_twitter.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_improved_bitly_plugin_adds_functionality_to_twitter.php Products Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:51:24 -0800 Sarah Perez Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening services' APIs to get traffic data and some of them don't update very frequently. There's also a lot of phantom clicks showing up; the company believes they've found a 3rd party app that's partially loading the destination pages and inflating the numbers, but we'll see if they can do anything about it. For now this data is better for determining the relative popularity of a shortened link than it is for literal numbers.

Twitter users will like the extension because hovering over any username there makes the user's information pop-up. That works quite well and is very useful. It's a fast way to see who someone is talking to in a conversation on Twitter.

The moral of the story here is that in little things like URL shortening, there's a whole lot of valuable information and room for innovation. We're glad that Bit.ly is moving to take advantage of that and we look forward to seeing what still other people will do with the data once it's stockpiled and made available by Bit.ly for further development.

You can get the Bit.ly extension for Firefox here.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers.

What Bit.ly Does Today

At launch Bit.ly is a relatively sophisticated URL shortener. It uses a cookie to remember the last 15 links you've shortened and displays that history on the home page when you visit. It allows you to set up a custom URL ending for your link. It automatically creates 3 thumbnails for every page you save a link to.

How about these features, though? Bit.ly saves a cached copy forever of every page you shorten a link to, on Amazon's S3 storage (processing is done on EC2, as well, so uptime looks good). Bit.ly also tracks clickthrough numbers and referrers so you can see what kind of traffic your shortcut got and from where. There's a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to any other web app (Betaworks affiliated gaming site ImInLikeWithYou already has this live) and all the data, including traffic data and thumbnails, is easily accessible by XML and JSON feeds.

Those are some pretty awesome features but that's only the beginning. A javascript submission bookmarklet and user accounts should be available soon. (Update: Bit.ly just added a simple bookmarklet that will make it easier to use casually.)

The Future of Bit.ly: Semantic and Geo Spatial Analysis

In the background, Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we've written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.

As if that's not a whole lot of awesome already - Bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of all the web pages it collects.

You want to see all the web pages related to the US Presidential election, Barack Obama and Asheville, North Carolina? Or about Technology, Google and The Dalles, Oregon? That will be what Bit.ly delivers if it can build up a substantial database of pages. Once it does, it will open that data up to other developers as well.

Why use a URL shortener to catalog all those pages? Why not? Each shortcut signals a page that's of importance to a real human user and an army of link-senders sounds like a great way to build up that database. Semantic indexing of the web through casual but opt-in and common user activity is a great strategy.

Then we can all share access to that data. We're excited and we hope you'll put Bit.ly to use.