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.