This is a handy little blog entry taken from the tweetmeme blog, which, according to them, tracks "the hottest links on twitter."
Shorten It: Most popular URL shorteners
We’ve all used them: services that allow us to take that horrendously long URL and compress it into a manageable size so it won’t take up too many precious characters in our tweets.
Here at Tweetmeme, we’re constantly downloading and storing your tweets with links in, so we’re in a unique position of being able to tell you exactly how many of you are using which URL-shortening service, and how they’re competing. We’ve taken a couple of weeks worth of data from Tweetmeme , and compiled the top 5 URL shorteners.
Site | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| tinyurl.com | 75.49 |
| bit.ly | 13.02 |
| ff.im | 4.87 |
| is.gd | 4.36 |
| twurl.nl | 2.26 |
As you can see, Tinyurl.com is clearly in the lead at the moment – this is most probably because it is the default service that both Twitter and Twhirl use (TweetDeck uses Bit.ly by default, but can use others) to shorten users’ URLs when required.
But we can do more than that – we’ve stored data from when the links are posted over time, so we can show you how the use is trending over time.
Use of top 5 URL shortening services over a 2-week period.
Close-up of services not including Tinyurl.com.
22 Responses to “Shorten It: Most popular URL shorteners”
(Edited to show you only responses from users/owners/developers from URL shortener websites and other helpful suggestions)
Problem is, Tinyurl wastes at least 5 characters right of the bat with their domain name alone, and then does things like stripping out your # anchor extensions, e.g. when trying to link back to a specific blog comment (is.gd does the same BTW). While some of the other services help in some way, they each have their own quirks, like wanting to own your stats data, or not allowing custom extensions when creating the shortened URLs from their bookmarklets. I’ve come up with a completely free, no-strings-attached solution using a Wordpress theme hack, that allows you to own your very own Tinyurl-like service. Check it out here: Nice to see this update on the URL shortner world. Even though Tiny URL has the big jump (obviously!), bit.ly is starting to come up nicely at ~13%. Another nice thing is that when you hit the retweet button – it’s a bit.ly created URL. Thank you for helping to spread the word about how cool and up and coming bit.ly is these days! Questions or concerns about bit.ly? Drop me a line anytime! Rex @ http://tinyarro.ws/ Can get a URL down to something like 10 characters. It’s great for saving space in tweets. SmallerLink.com lets you customize your ending, so that you can always remember where your photo albums are, or directions to your house, etc. We also track clicks, and let you browse through the history to see what others are shortening (and if you want you can keep your links hidden from the public list). http://SmallerLink.com any thoughts and suggestions are more than appreciated. Have fun guys, A big problem with some of these shorteners is that they aren’t consistent with the shortened URLs. This is a problem when trying to get the shortened URL for a blog post, for example, to look up tweetbacks. Here’s an example: Tweetmeme returned this Bitly URL for one of my blog posts When I go to Bitly and type in the same long URL, I get a different shortened link: You can see that both shortened links lead to the same URL. The same thing goes for TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/dha7vr (generated by Tweetmeme) http://tinyurl.com/dnakmd (generated by me) So if I search all tweets looking for http://tinyurl.com/dnakmd (when they tweeted withhttp://tinyurl.com/dha7vr ), it won’t find their tweets, even though they are out there. I’m also curious why Tweetmeme would use Bitly for one post and TinyURL for another? But this isn’t a problem with the plugin, it’s just an issue with URL shorteners in general (although I’ve heard is.gd is consistent). Anyone know a way around this? I’ve been racking my brains and looking online for some way to force the URL shorteners to be consistent with their shortened URLs. JohnAlex Schleber on March 23rd, 2009
Rex Dixon on March 27th, 2009
bit.lyStu on March 27th, 2009
Mike on April 7th, 2009
MikeJohn Ritz on April 12th, 2009
(me here. you know, spookie, the blogger… tiny url's come in handy everyplace. they are very handy when posting a link in a blog comment, and when posting long URL's in bulletins and posts on Myspace, which sometimes makes thew URL run off the browser page.)
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