Comments on: Why Bit.ly Will Upstage Digg http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/ Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:44:45 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Mihai Secasiu http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165895 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:22:54 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165895 Compared to digg bit.ly is still small. When spamers will realize that people go to bit.ly to find stories and not use it just as an url shortner they will start gaming the system.
Now digg knows a lot more about their users/voters then bit.ly will know about those that click the links so detecting the gaming might be harder for bit.ly

]]> By: leon http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165894 Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:58:18 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165894 would bit.ly be the digg killer or more over tinyurl.com ?

]]> By: Adam http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165893 Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:59:50 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165893 Bit.ly would be SO much more useful if Tweetdeck integrated with bit.ly directly so it would tie my bit.ly account into tweetdeck. Too much dancing around still.

]]> By: Subhankar Ray http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165892 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:45:55 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165892 A good discussion at AVC..
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/thats-only-ten-lines-of-code.html

]]> By: anonymous http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165891 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:42:38 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165891 Wouldn’t this whole area be a natural for Google to enter? The URL shortening part is trivial to code, and they probably already have some of the back-end click tracking stuff already.

]]> By: Howard http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165890 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:04:41 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165890 I find the graphs a bit misleading. For tr.im you show unique visitors go from 0 in Aug to 180K Jan. Over the same time period digg goes from 22M to 35M. That’s hardly plateauing and seems very healthy for an established site.. For bit.ly you show not unique visitors but clicks, hardly comparable.

]]> By: Subhankar Ray http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165889 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:01:46 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165889 Here is a comment, I made at AVC related to this..

If bit.ly really becomes popular, our concern is the one point of failure, and the structure of the web. Our web search engine AAfter.com creates two short URLs [including bit.ly] to make it a little more fail-safe. We found out there are 50 more such services, and will use two of them in a random manner to reduce the chance of one point of failure.

Here are the list of all such services that we have discovered. We hope internet will remain open and diverse with all of them..

tinyurl.com aafter.us is.gd ur1.ca ping.fm snipurl.com snipr.com bit.ly tr.im tr.im metamark.net xrl.us tweetburner.com twurl.nl x.se x.se poprl.com poprl.com url.ie url.ie 6url.com 6url.com yep.it yep.it ln-s.net ln-s.net piurl.com piurl.com yatuc.com yatuc.com g8l.us g8l.us icanhaz.com icanhaz.com urlkiss.com urlkiss.com minilien.com minilien.com tinylink.com tinylink.com urlcut.com urlcut.com doiop.com doiop.com simurl.com smurl.com tighturl.com tighturl.com 2tu.us myurl.in myurl.in memurl.com memurl.com redirx.com redirx.com easyurl.net easyurl.net qurlyq.com qurlyq.com dwarfurl.com dwarfurl.com shrinkurl.us shrinkurl.us starturl.com starturl.com urlhawk.com urlhawk.com canurl.com canurl.com surl.co.uk surl.co.uk lnkurl.com lnkurl.com urlbrief.com urlbrief.com urlborg.com urlborg.com ub0.cc urlvi.be urlvi.be sn.vc sn.vc lurl.no lurl.no hurl.ws hurl.ws twiturl.de twiturl.de spedr.com spedr.com parv.us parv.us decenturl.com decenturl.com shorterlink.com shorterlink.com shortlinks.co.uk shortlinks.co.uk budurl.com budurl.com shw.me shw.me

]]> By: BuzzNova http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165888 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:00:26 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165888 Agreed. Technically it is not difficult to create a shortening service; you just have to manage scaling well.

I’ve always found it interesting how easily these services are trusted. It would be simple enough to replace a mapped URL with another, lets say point the full URL at another site on the same topic but which is part of an affiliate program. Most people wouldn’t even know that they were sent to another site than the original desitination.

In fact their might be all kinds of interesting tracking, advertising and monetary implications by adding extra parameters to the original URL’s by the shortening service.

]]> By: kortina http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165887 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:57:39 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165887 Om, you’re spot on with your points about disaggregation and a distributed mechanism for viewing popularity and context. One of the first places we’ve begun working toward this is in our Firefox extension ( http://bit.ly/bitlyFirefox ), which provides contextual and click data from our API for short links you come across on any web page. So if you’re browsing your Twitter stream or reading a blog post and see an interesting link, you can just hover over it to get context (page title, full URL) and popularity estimate ( number of clicks it has received ) before deciding to visit the page. Here’s what it looks like: http://bit.ly/fdYxu

]]> By: Saurabh Kaushik http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165886 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:34:03 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165886 Great Idea!!!

]]> By: PXLated http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165885 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:48:23 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165885 No mention of TinyURL – aren’t they the traffic leader by far? If they add all the bit.ly stuff wouldn’t they be a contender.

]]> By: Abbi Vakil http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165884 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:29:12 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165884 Won’t the real winner be the company that works with publishers & puts a square box at the end of articles as part of the share/ digg/ buzz/ post area at the end of articles?

PS: I see http://di.gg is available for rent :-)

]]> By: Tony Wright http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165883 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:16:39 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165883 Interesting stuff.

Hypothetically speaking– what would happen if Twitter decided to:

1) Allow people to link to sites in the same way that you can in a gmail message (i.e. select, click a link icon, paste link– voila. A good old fashioned hyperlink!)

or

2) Launched it’s own URL shortening service

Either way, all of a sudden Twitter has all of this valuable click/link data. Also, it seems to me that the instant that Twitter does this is the instant that URL shorteners die.

]]> By: Ben http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165882 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:54:55 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165882 What does bitly do if you create a short URL out of a link thats already been shortened? Does it give you back the one that its already got in the database? Or does it create a new one anyway? Seems like it would be harder to get metrics based on clicks if it is always creating a new one. That is something that Digg excels at, alerting you when a story has already been submitted.

]]> By: AGORACOM - George http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165881 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:06:30 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165881 This may be true for the first time someone posts a bit.ly link. However, once people start re-tweeting or sending it to others, thereby leading to greater clicks, you can assume the link is popular for its content and not for its author.

Regards,
George

]]> By: Robert Dewey http://gigaom.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165880 Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:30:40 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/why-bitly-could-upstage-digg/#comment-165880 True, Marshall — I could see folks in the media and news business paying for this data.

I’m doubtful when it comes to regular consumers, though.

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