April 20th, 2009

URL Shorteners + Hype + Theories

I have been thinking a lot about bit.ly’s funding round that was announced a few weeks ago.  There has been a lot of attention lately on URL shortening, especially with the explosion of Twitter (Twitter on Oprah!) and the introduction of the Digg bar.

Why did bit.ly get money? There are a ton of URL shorteners out there – and my initial thought was that if Twitter ever introduced the ability to hyperlink I would stop using services like bit.ly completely.

But bit.ly’s appeal to investors rests not in its URL shortening, but rather its tracking system and analytics. By using a bit.ly link one can tell how many clicks his/her links are getting and where the clicks are coming from – even inside of social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Bit.ly can get where Google Analytics cannot, which is great for bloggers/content creators.

If the original Google search algorithm was constructed based on a system of hyperlinks/pagerank, there is potential in the data collected by bit.ly to create a collection of “live hyperlinks” where you can track how a link is passed among people/websites. This would dovetail nicely with the [somewhat] burgeoning “semantic web” (ok, burgeoning since 2001, but still) in that it would provide more human, dynamic, and real-time input on hyperlinking.

That type of data, if presented right, has huge potential for online advertising.

OK, I’m convinced.