URL shorteners testing waters of social media

by Dan Leahul, revolutionmagazine.com 30-Jun-09, 15:55

LONDON - With the proliferation of Twitter, URL shortening has become an unforeseen goldmine of the digital age, and following Twitter's recent shift to Bit.ly from Tinyurl.com as its default provider, the company is looking to capitalise on the millions of clicks it processes everyday.

In fact, Bit.ly is branching out its services into social media, aiming squarely at websites like Digg and Reddit, which allows its users to decide what's hot on the web by voting for their favourite links.

There are a number of URL shorteners available on the web, but Bit.ly is unique in that it allows users to track the link, giving feedback as it makes its way through the various social networks.

Because of this, Twitter made the change to Bit.ly as its default service, instead of Tinyurl.com, which it had used previously. To create a shorter Bit.ly URL, users can visit the Bit.ly homepage, or type the address into the Twitter page, which will be automatically converted once published.

The website is also the preferred choice among marketers, who are able to integrate the service with Google Analytics for online campaigns.

Bit.ly said that 7m unique URLs are shortened through the service everyday, usually for websites like Twitter which have a limit on the number of characters allowed per post.

Those 7m links result in more than 2m are clicks everyday, providing Bit.ly with a vast pool of data of what's capturing the interest of internet users at any given moment, in real time.

The company is said to be working on a new project, dubbed Bit.ly Now, which will compete with Digg in the realm of user-voted content.

Bit.ly said the project will not only be able to tell what's hot on the internet, but will be able to predict what's going to be an internet sensation, whether a news story or interesting viral.

A key difference is that Digg users vote for what's relevant or interesting to them, where as Bit.ly Now will essentially count each click as a vote in favour.

The rumours about Bit.ly Now were confirmed by tech blog TechCrunch yesterday, who predicted the service will inevitably clash with Digg once it launches.

It's not clear how Bit.ly Now would attract revenue, but there's no doubt media owners and publishers would be interested in knowing what's piquing the attention of users before anyone else does.

Digg, on the other hand, has begun to develop a sustainable business model, recently rolling out a new ad platform today, which masks ads as user-submitted content and allows users to vote ads up and down the same way that they do with content.

Digg Ads, as the service is called, allows marketers to get real-time feedback on the performance on their campaigns, with clearly marked sponsored items, which are voted on by Digg's 36m-strong user base.