Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly for a reason
Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly as its default URL shortening provider a few months back, which basically put TinyURL to a very difficult position to survive and throw tr.im out of the business. I had been wondering why Twitter made the change because all in all, it’s just a service that shortens the URL and redirect them to the right place. Why does it all matter? I just didn’t quite understand up until now after I have been using it quite extensively for a while.
It’s not like bit.ly has a shorter domain than TinyURL.com. Otherwise, tr.im would have won the game. It’s the statistical tools that bit.ly offers to tracks the popularity of your shortened links matter the most. Basically, you can track pretty much all links shortened by bit.ly, not only yours but others as well, by simply adding a “+” at the end of the shortened link. For example, http://bit.ly/4qdChv is the shortened link for the twitter contest I am currently running on Windows7hacker.com. If you are interested how many hits I got, simply type in http://bit.ly/4qdChv+ in your address bar. And yes, you can do the same to pretty much all links shortened by bit.ly.
Not only that, if you sign up an account with them you can actually have all shortened links organized within your account. Plus, you get your own API Key that you can use with other application. For example, I use bit.ly as the link shortening service with the API Key in twitterfeed.com so every time when I have a new blog post here it will automatically post a tweet on twitter with bit.ly’s shortened link. So not only do I post tweets automatically but I can also track the detail statistics how many actually clicked and viewed my post.
It also provides a few tools for you to easily shorten the links with capability of posting to Twitter the same time. You can use browser bookmarklet, browser sidebar, or a plugin if you are using Firefox. And you can even use them without signing an account.
No wonder Twitter picked them. It beats TinyURL in almost every aspect. It’s certainly one of the best on the link shortening market.
