URL Shortener Gets Long On Money
Investors bet on Bit.ly, and maybe Qaddafi
So what’s beyond social networking and microblogging? Some speculate it might URL-shortening, mostly because of sheer practicality. A new type of metrics URL-shortners offer also make them attractive topic, though nobody’s quite that sure just yet.
Dave Winer
Take Bit.ly, for example, created with the help of RSS visionary Dave Winer. Investors were confident enough in its future to throw $2 million worth of venture capitalism its way, and they did so despite it holding a far distant second place in the burgeoning URL-shortner market.
TinyURL, which you’ve likely seen used much more, is used by 75 percent of those shortening their links. Bit.ly only has a 13 percent market share, which makes it a perplexing investor bet.
But according to some respected observers, Bit.ly might be poised for a market takeover. For one, say the Tweet-elite, it’s the default shortener on TweetDeck, a popular Adobe Air application for organizing Twitter (and other social) streams.
Secondly, Bit.ly offers ever valuable data. It remembers the last 15 URLs a user creates, stores them on a personal homepage, tracks clicks and referrals, automatically mirrors each page, automatically creates thumbnails for linked-to pages, and makes the data accessible via XML or JSON interfaces.
Om Malik thinks Bit.ly’s data collection capability could lead it to Digg-killer status:
its real prowess lies in its ability to track the click-performance of those URLs, and conversations around those links. It doesn’t matter where those URLs are embedded — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, email, instant messages or SMS messages — a click is a click and Bit.ly counts it, in real time. Last week alone, nearly 25 million of these Bit.ly URLs were clicked.
By clicking on these URLs, people are essentially voting on the stories behind these links. Now if Bit.ly collated all these links and ranked them by popularity, you would have a visualization of the top stories across the web. In other words, it would be a highly distributed form of Digg.com...
Critics are quick to note that the clicker often doesn’t know what he’s clicking on because the URL is essentially cloaked unless they’ve installed a Firefox extension allowing them to see where a shortened URL is leading. This was the reason for the popular and slightly stupid “Rickroll” Web fad, where people were told a link led one place and were led to a Rick Astley music video instead.
That inspired crooks on Twitter and Facebook to lure users into phishing scams, as well.
Assuming the transparency problem is never solved (and one imagines it will have to be eventually), the clickability of a link might reflect the influence of the person providing it, rather than a real measure of popularity. Others suggest this is remedied by measuring how viral a link is: if it spreads, it’s popular.
Market share aside, Bit.ly’s at least got geek credibility and enough bean-counter credibility to grab some funding. The next step may be to hope Qaddafi doesn’t take it over because of violations to Lybian or Islamic law; .LY domains are owned and controlled by the nation of Lybia.
resource:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/02/url-shortener-gets-long-on-money
