I’m sure I’m a minority here, but are URL shorteners (e.g. TinyURL) really a “business”? Bit.ly raised $2m in funding for this? What?
On the news that Twitter has switched URL shorteners, why isn’t Twitter doing this themselves? Either by handling URL shortening directly, or even better, treating URLs properly with respect to contributing to the 140 char tweet limit.
I must be missing something.
not sure how i feel about it but–
the rationale is that URls are a valuable currency, and being able to sort and index and search URLs (that is, whatever URLs are being posted and clicked in realtime, or over time) is a valuable pole position
this is a first cousin to the current excitement about “realtime search”, e.g. twitter search and the like — the idea being that spider-ing web pages tells you one thing (and one thing that is hugely useful and valuable) but spidering what people are posting and doing as they do it is also a big search opportunity
clear as mud?
Steve: I get those angles, but I’m still wondering why ‘url shortening’ is a stand-alone business.
The near real-time sorting, indexing, and searching of URLs feels like a feature on Twitter, or whatever place those URLs are getting shared.
yes, but the url shorteners are where the clicks can be sorted tracked counted etc
twitter can only know the shortened url, not the starting point and destination and click etc etc etc
no?
Because betaworks believes that real time streaming is disruptive, and bit.ly is important infrastructure to social distribution
Here is the un-shortening explaination:
http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2009/04/19/699/
Having said this, seems like most could build a URL shortener for themselve in a few hours, including all the click analytics.