Sharing links on Twitter can be quite a pain when you need to input a web address that consumes most of the space you have at your disposal for your micro-message. The startup realized that quickly and automatically started shortening long URLs to make its users save on space for their 140-character updates.
To get this implemented, Twitter went with TinyURL, a service that shortens URLs down signficantly (but not extremely) and at the time had been around for years already. It never gave a reason for this choice, but it did provide TinyURL with a lot of exposure and a lot of extra traffic.
Those days are over. Apparently, Twitter has silently replaced TinyURL as its default URL shortening service with bit.ly, a competing service that launched quite recently and not too long ago raised $2 million from several prominent angel investors.
This is actually not that much of a surprise. Betaworks, the startup accelerator behind Twitter related companies such as Summize (acquired by Twitter in July 2008), is also behind bit.ly, and it just happens to also count early Twitter investors and advisors Chris Sacca and Ron Conway as their own backers.
Which obviously prompts this inevatible question: does the move signal Twitter paving the way for an outright acquisition of the URL shortening service provider?
(Thanks to Avi Muchnick for letting us know)
Not surprised at all, Both companies share betaworks as an investor.
And with bit.ly getting investment recently, I wonder if some of that funding went to buying the shortening usage from Twitter.
$2m for this kind of company seems excessive. As mentioned below (on the wrong post) I wrote
I wrote my http://tcbp.net in an hour.
It took me a little bit longer to do the algo to get the shortest url possible, but still. It was all within a few hours.
True, and this was their worst decision, if they want to make Twitter an eco system.
Well I like Twitter’s decision. Twitter’s text limit is harsh. Bit.ly URLS are much shorter than tinyurl.com already, even before the slash.
Can we have a single post not mentioning Twitter in some way?
Don’t wish for too much.
Seriously? $2M for this?
I wrote my http://tcbp.net in an hour.
oops, wrong reply
How about the one immediately preceding this one?
http://www.tech...ealed-liveblog/
Anton – give it a few weeks til the next shiny thing pops up.
yes
beside that – both of them use the common development platform which is ruby on rails.
i thot twitter switch to using Scala so that they could scale better?
Twitter uses RoR for the front-end and Scala for the messaging backend. You’re both right.
http://highscal...calable-twitter
Keiretsu….
I just said this yesterday, if Twitter would just fix their shit to allow hyperlinks instead of wasting characters on links this wouldn’t even be an issue.
What the hell is the problem that makes this so hard for them to accomplish? And how is a URL-shortening service gaining millions of dollars on top of that?
I agree that what Twitter really needs to do is add link and media children off of the main 140 character micro-doc. However the phone, and more specifically, SMS, does not support this.
Currently you get the whole 140 character story with the current denormalized, single body, micro-doc.
The way I see it, if somebody has to use SMS to update their Twitter then it’s probably safe to assume it’s not a web-browsing device; otherwise, why wouldn’t they just use the mobile site? And if all they can use is SMS, I don’t think they’ll be too worried about putting links in their tweets anyway.
I don’t feel like they need to add a separate section to tweets to allow for links, the hyperlink would work just fine and wouldn’t add to the character count so it’d effectively be out of the way.
+1, though I’d still love the stats.
ever heard of SMS? You aren’t a techie, are you?
Holy shit we got a genius here. I’ve never heard of anybody short of a fucking rocket scientist who ever heard of SMS. Especially not myself or the person I was replying to, where we surely didn’t discuss SMS at all.
No sir, if you look a handful of pixels above your own comment you’ll see nothing about SMS there. Not a single word about it.
NOT surprised at ALL. Honestly, I must be the only freakin person on the PLANET that can see every single move from every single direction within the Twitter organization.
First: summize was purchased (betaworks)
Second: Twitter opens a clickable banner ad (to promote TweetDeck and others)
Third: Twitter now is promoting TipJoy on the clickable space on Twitter.com (tipjoy is a BetaWorks property)
BETAWORKS was the first VC money into Twitter, they are getting liquidated to holy hell and Twitter is now giving back in the form of “front page” coverage for many many apps that are funded by Betaworks.
I guess we will never leave the VC funding inside activities. There are some sweet applications that deserve a lot more credit than ones funded by Betaworks.
If Twitter buys bit.ly it better be for less than the $2,000,000 put in because there are people that can build bit.ly prototypes in about 3 hours.
I don’t get why short URL needs venture capital involved. I mean, I’ve built similar things, I know of hundreds of others who have and we all operate them for free. How does $2million get spent? I mean, you only need a few servers even if you’re pushing millions of visitors.
I’d imagine most of the $2 million is being spent expanding services beyond the basic shortening so people’ll pay for them.
As an example, I know my employer would love detailed historical stats on all the bit.ly links our various Twitter accounts link to – clickthroughs, referrers, etc.
Yeh that should easily cost about what, an hours worth of work at $50 an hour. Questioning where venture capital disappears is definitely valid.
“If Twitter buys bit.ly it better be for less than the $2,000,000 put in because there are people that can build bit.ly prototypes in about 3 hours.”
People always say they could build Twitter prototypes in less than 3 hours, it doesn’t necessarily make Twitter worth only $2 mil though…
agreed.
I like tr.im better.
Better domain for sure.
tr.im has the best domain name around and slightly smoother feel, but it’s stats don’t seem comprehensive as bit.ly right now. bit.ly also tracks comments from the linked site, which is helpful. A killer feature, IMHO, would be to track down comments about the link from *any* site and display them on the page. (And, if I’m being greedy, toss in extra stats on the commenters — where else do they comment, what about, who follows them, what’s their clout (or Klout.net), and so on.
@ceejayoz, my clients would love all that and more — and would even pay for the privilege.
Another vote for tr.im
you basically just exactly described Peashoot…
http://pea.to/peashoot-report
Wordpress powered sites can automatically shorten their URL with the buitin functionality, like Iév stated here http://aytemir....-try-wordpress/
I suppose the same could go for twitter? It shouldn’t be that hard…?
wow! more news about twitter and that 10 line of code embarrassment called bit.ly! please keep it coming twitcrunch. at least bit.ly articles prove how ignorant VCs are about tech ($2 million?? haha), and that’s a point worth making
Amen! Betaworks should be blasted for giving $2,000,000 to something that can be built by using a whole host of IP/URL tracking software tools. We are building one right now, and it took a week, that includes location based clicks and much better info than what bit.ly provides. Thats worth atleast $5,000,000 in BetaWorks valuation $
How can you every make money with an URL-shortening service? Sure, you can serve ads on your homepage, but my guess is that 95 % of the usage comes through some sort of API. Anyone?
Read ceejayoz reply… he makes a good point, I would also like to know those stats.
I’d love it if they purchased bit.ly. It makes sense, it seems like it’s all in the family anyway, and bit.ly is a bit safer than TinyURL in terms of detecting what the website is going to.
Not to mention, bit.ly offers analytics, very valuable to companies and brands looking to advertise on Twitter (hint. hint.)
Maybe the problem was with me. Every time I clicked on a URL with the beginning of http://tinyurl the website would not appear and the was notified that I could shorten the URL.
Seemed like a ton of people with similar problems were not having their messages seen if referred to a URL too long.
Thank you for listening.
Jim
Whenever I update my Twitter, I always prefer using TinyURL instead of Bit.ly. I personally think it looks a bit tidier in the sense of tinyurl looking for more efficient. Also, I think this isn’t such big news as there is no costs involved or anything along those lines…
I personally like bit.ly they actually allow you track your links and see who has clicked on them. Tinyurl does nothing to that effect. Also I can send out a tweet from bit.ly website.
Here’s an open letter I had written to TinyURL… I kind of saw this coming. I’m upset for him about the blown opportunity. His service was around for so long and it’s disappointing that more couldn’t be done with it in time to keep his free pass on the Twitter train.
http://worth100...press.com/?p=20
I am glad that finally Twitter ditched tinyurl. BTW what happens to the bit.ly links we share? Will it be incorporated in your account in bit.ly?
The thing that makes URL shortening services valuable is longevity. What good are shortened links (SEO, etc) if they break one day because the service goes away. It makes perfect sense to fund a shortening service, and makes perfect sense for Twitter to buy one.
“inevitable”, not “inevatable”
I think that once Twitter monetizes their first order of business will be their own URL shortening service.
I hope Twitter brings this feature in-house soon, either by acquiring Bit.ly or by developing their own URL shortener. I don’t like the idea of all my Twitter links breaking at some point because the third party service Twitter uses goes down temporarily or closes shop entirely.
Wow, I’m sure the programmer that wrote and launched tinyurl 7 years ago must be devastated.
I am confused… when they “replaced” it, does it mean you are not allowed to use anything else than bit.ly ?? or is it still OK to use any other shortening software. If yes, then, whats the point of this article??
please help!
Of course you can use another shortening service – it’s just text in a box. This just affects the *default* shortening – if you pasted an unshortened long URL, Twitter would convert it into a TinyURL automatically for you. Now it’ll turn it into a bit.ly link.
Am I missing something here? A url shortner is a commodity which loses value as their namespaces run out. So, you can last as long as you have domains and a short namespace.
Does anyone feel tied to a particular url shortener?
Some sites don’t use case-sensitive characters for their urls. This includes TinyURL. That drastically changes the number of URLs allowed per x-character string.
TinyURL could only allow for 60 million short urls with a 5 character extension after their name. By comparison Bit.ly is case sensitive, increasing their 5 character extension capacity to 916 million short urls. TinyURL currently uses 6 character extensions (2.2 billion urls available) and their domain name is 5 characters longer than bit.ly
That means for bit.ly urls to be the same length as a tinyurl.com url, they’d have to run out of 5,6,7,8,9,10 character extensions, which combined have a possible: 853,058,371,851,163,296 urls to be shortened. 853 quadrillion.
You realize that TinyURL could change their system, either by adding one more character or turning on Character Sensitivity.
No reason for them to do that until they ran out of room… but until that time why should they bother?
These services do extend characters once the allotment runs out, but for length purposes of a short URL, even if they altered the db for case sensitivity without extending characters, their links would still be longer.
TinyURL was slowing down under the load. I expect Bit.ly, which I use, might run into similar problems. However, Bit.ly appears to have the cash for more servers, if they need them.
–rj
A lot of jealousy and envy seems to pop up in these comments. “Dumb 10 line code site gets $2 million dollars investment” all that reads as is “why can’t I come up with something simple that gets that kind of money.”
Regardless of the simplicity in the URL shortening-redirection aspect, one thing bit.ly does in comparison to tinyurl is that it keeps a bit of detailed statistics on the clickthrough of a bit.ly link.
These statistics include: how many clicks on that link, the referrals for that link, the locations of the people who clicked on that link, under the metrics of now (an ajax’ed “real time” click stats from the past hour), past day, past week, past month, total. It also attempts to show you how many twitter conversations, friend feed conversations, and backtype conversations discuss the link.
This can be tested by going to placing “info/” after bit.ly/ and before the link’s short code.
The average user probably won’t care about these statistics, but there are people who are promoting their urls interested in this information, and as an issue discussed in another blog post about URL shorteners on TC, lessens the issue of people not being able to have any real stats on their visitors come when the visitor comes from a short url.
checkout trl.to
Twitter Resource Locator
For the love of god, stop with the “micro-messaging” crap.
Now we can see that the 2m investment in bit.ly was directly interrelated to Twitter picking them up. Lots of back stage manipulations going on the we see not.
I love http://to.ly more
Apache .htaccess files anyone? One line of code will do it:
Redirect permanent /2f8d3 http://www.tech...yurl-for-bitly/
yields:
http://mundy.org/2f8d3
Now send me my $2 million, please.
Strangely though we’ve noticed a slowdown on the response rate of tinyurl. I guess without the twitter load it might speed up. Saying that if you are providing twitter support services like we are then I guess we’ll need to move to bit ly too and keep the flavour the same for users.
I just sold b.ly for $1250. I’ve got m.ly on auction on sedo atm, $400 current bid.
Another short message just like http://sm.tv
I thought something was different. Maybe Twitter will buy one of the short url companies shortly?
I am happy with http://aafter.us/
Check it out.
Regards,
SharonHill
I have to say that I feel a little bad for TinyURL. They were basically destroyed by Twitter.
The article itself says that TinyURL was starting off with a disadvantage being a longer base url, but add on top of it the millions of links Twitter was adding to it, and it’s length expanded quickly.
I don’t think many of the links for TinyURL that went through Twitter did anything for TinyURL in the end. How many people here actually know what TinyURL’s website looks like? I don’t.
…so many URL shorteners out there (good ones too). bit.ly & tr.im are both the best in tracking in my opion! Now, if you want to monetize with shortening, then adjix.com comes into play (used heavily by @guykawasaki
I switch between them as I go…
I personally haven’t seen any url shortening lately. I was start to wonder if they were still in business.
http://twitter....uses/1765693529
I’ve built the world’s shortest short URL generator in just 10 lines of code. Try it out http://tungwaiy...p.info/shorturl. It is a lot of fun.
You forgot to make a table with the smallest one’s like http://o.ly
Why choose Libya .ly as a domain?
Cool way to reduce the amount we type in. But personally I always view these kind of things as a easy way to monitor web usage. If penetration gets enough.
We’re new, and not included in the article but
we think our URL shortening service http://zi.pe brings a lot of value into the short URL market.
We not only shorten links, but also text, email addresses, and a photos (with upload).
People get a bad taste in their mouths for short url services because they are still using the original old school ones that have little to no value.
Bit.ly and TinyUrl are both out-dated and their url’s are too long. One character can make or break a great twitter post…
Check out: http://txtn.us – just in Beta mode.
It uses special characters to guarantee just 6 characters in the URL, like this:
http://❽.ws/❤
Seems pretty cool. They also have tools to reduce text using ligature replacements, to fit more into the 140 limits. It’s beta but I’ve noticed it’s getting better. And why not? My son is heading things up.
Wow, I was about to bash bit.ly because tr.im and ow.ly are 1 character shorter, but I didn’t consider unicode! That’s a great idea, what they’re doing.
I like that one, brings me more followers http://twi.gy
Has anyone considered the impact by google and others now searching Tweets? It’s giving a huge benefit to bit.ly in search rankings now… And if you are “advertising” a link, then you lose out. Not to mention that your site gets ZERO branding when a bit.ly link goes out.
Just a thought.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee…
I don’t care man! I love Organic Solutions for Human Issues, that’s what I really care about: http://bit.ly/1QHu2H See for yourself!
Too many services, which one is the best overall? I’m happy with Tinyurl. Good name, easy service.