May 4, 2009
Mini-Links to Web Sites Are Multiplying
By JENNA WORTHAM
If you have spent any time on the Internet in the last few months, chances are you have clicked on a shortened link Web address.
URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years. The most popular service, TinyURL.com, was started in 2002 by a unicyclist named Kevin Gilbertson.
But the tools have soared in popularity recently, in part because of microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, where messages are limited in length and every character counts.
URL shorteners are easy to build, and dozens of competitors have proliferated, with minimalist, character-conserving names like Bit.ly, Is.gd and Tr.im. Most of them are simple tools created as a labor of love with no real business model behind them.
Shorteners, however, could have real value beyond making Web addresses more manageable, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land.
They have the ability to keep track of use — how many times a particular link was clicked and the geographic location of the clickers — which could be valuable to marketers, news outlets and companies looking to measure the impact of a link, tweet or mention online.
“The tracking element is very important,” said Mr. Sullivan. Some tools even highlight comments posted to Facebook or FriendFeed about a particular link — features that standard tools like Google Analytics may not be able to provide.
One popular link shortening service, Bit.ly, is trying to build a business around that kind of data.
Betaworks Studios is a New York technology incubator that has invested in Tumblr, a microblogging tool; OMGPOP, a social gaming site; and Outside.in, a hyperlocal news aggregator. It developed Bit.ly as an internal tool for its portfolio of companies to use.
“It emerged as much more than that,” said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks. “Everyone from Dell to Demi Moore is on Twitter and could want to track their emerging social system.”
Since Bit.ly was introduced last year, its volume has soared. The company says that now 50 million Bit.ly links are clicked each week — more than double the rate of early April. “And next week, we’re expecting to hit 60 million,” said Andrew Weissman, the chief operating officer of Betaworks.
The growth has attracted venture financing. Bit.ly recently announced that it had raised $2 million from investors that included Alpha Tech Ventures, the software industry pioneer Mitch Kapor and the early Google investor Ron Conway.
“The Web has been devoid of a feedback loop for a while,” said Christopher Sacca, an investor who has financed several Web start-ups, including Bit.ly, Twitter and Photobucket.
Because Bit.ly tracks its clipped URLs in real time, no matter where they are posted — instant messages, Twitter, Facebook, blogs or e-mail — the service could become “a real source for extracting information about how people are using the Web,” Mr. Sacca said.
In addition to tracking links, Bit.ly uses a service called Calais, developed by Thomson Reuters, that can extract semantic terms from the Web pages that Bit.ly users are redirected to. This allows Bit.ly track the most popular topics being shared across the Web, as well as zero in on a specific category like finance or health care and retrieve the most popular Web sites shared on that subject in the last 24 hours.
The company hopes that being able to track the “social distribution of information in real-time,” as Mr. Borthwick describes it, could potentially be relevant to the future of Web search.
Although Bit.ly is not yet sure how to make money from all this data, “there’s a business model here,” Mr. Borthwick said. “We can smell it.”
For all the convenience of short URLs, some Internet security experts worry that they could be used to camouflage spam and phishing attacks and redirect people to malicious Web sites.
“People have no way to know where they’re going,” said Patrik Runald, chief security advisor at F-Secure Security Labs, a maker of security software. “These services are great and they serve a purpose, but at the same time, there is a darker side.”
And if a shortening site shuts down, any links funneled through it would be lost forever, Mr. Runald said.
Bit.ly says it is developing an archive system to keep links from decaying and employs several filters and a preview function in Firefox and TweetDeck, a desktop application for Twitter, to help cut back on spam.
Given the ease of use, the bigger threat to start-up companies like Bit.ly is that major corporations will create their own custom URL shorteners to bolster their brands. Digg, StumbleUpon and FriendFeed recently unveiled shortening services, and it would be easy for the big social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, to create their own. And there is always the chance that a heavyweight like Google will step in and obliterate the competition.
“That’s always a risk, but we’re racing to establish ourselves in the market,” said Mr. Weissman. “We’re willing to bet that innovation comes from weird little corners of the Internet, like this.”
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