URL shorteners

Bit.ly gets into reputation monitoring and search

Thanks to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. information is being collected, aggregated and distributed faster than ever. That’s a good thing for a number of reasons, but keeping track of what’s taking place on the ‘real-time‘ web can be challenging.

Plenty of companies are trying to do just that. From helping consumers stay on top of the latest news to assisting companies with their online reputations, players in the social media search and monitoring spaces are taking numerous approaches.

But some of the best positioned companies are those that collect the seemingly countless links that are shared every day on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Now playing: your own (free) URL shortener

Thanks in large part to Twitter, URL shorteners, love them or hate them, are almost ubiquitous on the internet today.

When it comes to URL shorteners, Bitly was one of the early pioneers that took advantage of Twitter’s growing popularity to position itself smack dab in the center of all of the social line sharing that Twitter is so often used for.

When all your shortlinks belong to the Libyan government

In 2009, ‘sex educator’ Violet Blue launched a URL shortener designed
for all of those NSFW links you might want to share. The service,
billed as the “first and only sex-positive URL shortener”, was located
at vb.ly.

Most of us don’t think about the .ly portion of the URL when we, for
instance, see a bit.ly link. But as vb.ly learned the hard way, it’s
pretty important.

In its quest for links, Google promotes its URL shortener

Google may be the most dominant search engine in many parts of the world, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its work cut out for it in meeting future challenges.

One of those challenges: tapping into all the links that are being shared on services like Facebook and Twitter. After all, the links sharing that takes place on these services represents a potentially valuable ‘signal‘ that Google can factor into its algorithm.

The absurdity of redirect hell

If you had to think of all the adjectives that describe the web, there’s a good chance that ‘efficient‘ would be one of them. After all, few tools offer the ability to find information so easily and effectively.

But behind the scenes, the web may be getting less efficient in one area: getting you from point A to point B. That’s because of the proliferation of redirects being put into use by some of the internet’s most prominent services.

Another reason to avoid URL shorteners: they’re slow

It is said that necessity is the mother of all invention, and that’s certainly true of URL shortening services. The rise of the status update means that there’s no room for an extraneous character, and that has in turn led to the rise of URL shortening services that make sure the links shared in status updates don’t take up any more room than needed.

As these services have grown in popularity, it’s not uncommon to see shortened URLs used in places where there’s really no need for them, from blog comments to emails.