Bit.ly Switch Part of Twitter’s Realtime Search Strategy

URL shorteners sprang into sudden essentialness with the advent of microblogging, and especially with the advent of Twitter. Until yesterday, TinyURL was the shortener of choice, boosted by Twitter’s default shortener setting.

Twitter’s sudden switch to competing URL shortener Bit.ly not only was a surprise to many, but the move could spell an unforeseen and swift death for TinyURL. So what gives? What makes one URL shortener different from another?

The most persuasive answer (there are others, and we’ll get to them) is metrics. Unlike TinyURL, Bit.ly is also a trend management and metrics platform, one that is very useful not only for tracking shortened links, but also for gleaning information about current trends and memes. In short, forgive the pun, Bit.ly enables better real-time search and meme tracking, two things valuable to both users and marketers.

Twitter’s announcement that Twitter Search will be crawling links in tweets and indexing content from those pages, then, is not an incident isolated from the switch to Bit.ly. Bit.ly may just enable Twitter to finally monetize itself.

There was an early signal for this turn of events and it was Google who sent it. When Google News made its appearance on Twitter by setting up an official account, Bit.ly was the search company’s URL shortener of choice. Google’s love and need for data make it easy to see why. At the same time, Google’s use was an implicit endorsement, and maybe and indication that Google had a keen interest gleaning what data it could for its own purposes.

And then of course are all the convenient entangling alliances. The same investors backing Summize, which became Twitter Search, also back Bit.ly, and were early investors in Twitter itself. Add a pinch of the fact Twitter was founded by ex-Googlers and a dash of RSS-creator Dave Winer’s involvement with the creation of Bit.ly and you have a stew with the distinct aroma of good ole boy handshakes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and it’s a partnership that makes for some excellent new, perhaps incredibly monetizable, potential. It will be interesting to see what happens to incumbent champion TinyURL (and the others) now that the geek powers that be have backed a different horse. At least through April, TinyURL shortened 66 percent of all shortened links, compared to Bit.ly’s 12 percent and ow.ly’s 11 percent.