Bit.ly Dominates TinyURL and 213 other Link Shorteners

Bit.ly continues to dominate the link shortener usage on Twitter through July 2009. Bit.ly has doubled the number of links being shared per day on Twitter from 800,000 in June to 1.7M by the end of July. In the same time, TinyURL lost half of their traffic, dropping from 500,000 to under 250,000 links shared per day.

No other link shortener has more than 1/4 of the traffic of the two leaders, and in fact, the next two leaders, is.gd and tr.im lost about 30% of their traffic in the last month.

Amazon has an Integrated URL Shortener - AMZN.COM

Kyle Mulka just tweeted an AMZN.COM url to a product page. I was amazed that this didn't get converted to a longer URL, but that Amazon allows for this alternate page representation. Here's an example:

http://amzn.com/076790818X

I started playing with a number of other shortcuts besides product codes and found some other URL's that do redirect to other Amazon.com URL's:

• amzn.com - You can go to amazon's home page with this shorter version.
• amzn.com/books - Each of the major sections of the Amazon store seem to have their own shortcut (other examples: amzn.com/bestsellers, amzn.com/kindle, amzn.com/electronics, etc.
• amzn.com/bill - Information about your Amazon bill.
• amzn.com/help - Amazon's Help page.

Interestingly, I note that almost no one seems to be twittering these short URL's directly (less than one per day on Twitter right now - and only 15 people have sent updates including them in the last two weeks).

I also note that Google does not have any pages in it's search index using the amzn.com domain.

As Twitter becomes more popular, I think more sites will be incorporating URL shorteners into their applications, enabling their users to share their pages without resorting to 3rd party services. Amazon's tool, like Digg's "Digg Bar", is also a handy address-bar shortcut; I can envision training myself to type amzn.com/kindle instead of visiting amazon.com and then navigating to the kindle section.

Update: Analysis of AMZN.COM shortcuts

My curiosity piqued, I decided to see what mysteries lay behind the AMZN.COM domain. I wrote a program to search through an English dictionary looking for valid shortcuts. I found that they break down into a few distinct categories.

Feature Pages

The biggest category (496 shortcuts) I found are "feature" pages. These seem to be highly customized pages about a collection of product types. I'm assuming these are hand crafted by Amazon's editors.

accessories, adobe, ads, advertise, advertising, airborne, aldo, allied, angel, apparel, apple, archery, artisan, artists, arts, ati, atlanta, atlantis, att, austin, auto, automotive, autos, av, avon, baby, badminton, baking, ballet, bargain, bargains, baseball, basket, basketball, beauty, bedding, benefit, bernardo, beverages, bibles, blackberry, blankets, bleachers, blizzard, block, boating, bob, bodybuilding, bolt, bombay, books, borders, bosch, boss, bostitch, bostonian, brass, braun, broadband, broadway, brother, business, calendars, camera, cameras, camping, campus, canning, cannon, canon, car, careers, cars, catcher, cellular, celtic, champs, charities, charity, chat, cheap, chicago, chocolate, choice, christian, christianity, christy, citizen, classical, clearance, clifford, climbing, clothes, clothing, coffee, college, columbia, comics, command, computer, computers, concert, concord, condiments, confessions, construction, contractor, cooking, corporate, costume, costumes, country, crafts, crane, creative, crew, cricket, criterion, dallas, dance, decca, decks, decor, delta, denver, detroit, diamonds, discount, discounts, diving, dolls, dove, drapers, drugstore, drums, dummies, easter, eastman, educational, ei, electronics, emerging, engagement, engineering, entertaining, entertainment, essentials, et, exercise, eyewitness, fans, fantasy, faulkner, feed, feeding, fencing, festivals, financial, financing, fishing, fitness, flash, flashlight, flip, flowers, focus, food, football, footprint, footwear, fossil, fox, fragrance, fragrances, franklin, fresco, freud, fuji, furniture, galaxy, games, gaming, garden, gardening, gateway, gear, gilbert, ginkgo, giving, global, golf, gourmet, gps, graduation, green, griffin, grizzly, groceries, grocery, guess, guitars, gymnastics, hallmark, halloween, halo, hannah, hannibal, hardware, harry, health, hearts, heaters, hefty, hi, hiking, hips, history, hitchcock, hobbies, hobby, hockey, holmes, home, hoover, horizon, horror, household, hue, hulk, hunting, ice, indies, industrial, ink, insomnia, instruments, ironing, irwin, isi, jazz, jello, jet, jewelry, jobs, journey, kaiser, kids, kitchen, kraft, landscaping, latin, leadership, leapfrog, learning, leatherman, lee, levels, levis, librarian, libraries, licensing, lighting, literature, lodge, lucky, lush, macintosh, magazines, majestic, marvel, maverick, may, meats, medical, memory, metal, method, mi, microwaves, milwaukee, mini, minneapolis, mixers, monster, monsters, motorcycle, movies, mozart, murray, music, nabisco, nara, nautilus, naxos, nec, nfl, nick, nikko, nonfiction, nordstrom, notebooks, nuance, nursery, nursing, observer, office, olympics, olympus, oneida, oracle, organic, orvis, oshkosh, outdoors, outlet, paint, palm, paramount, parsons, parts, patio, patrician, patton, pc, pearls, penny, performance, pets, philadelphia, phillips, philosophy, phoenix, photo, pillows, planters, plumbing, po, polar, polaroid, polo, pools, practices, prepare, preschool, presto, princess, processing, professional, progressive, projects, puma, puzzles, pyrex, read, reese, reference, relic, religion, remington, replacements, resolutions, revere, ricci, rival, rockport, rocks, rodeo, romance, roots, rousseau, royal, rpg, ruby, running, russell, safety, sage, sale, salter, sandpaper, sands, sante, sauces, save, scholastic, science, scientific, seafood, seattle, security, sees, services, sesame, sewing, sex, shakespeare, sharp, shoes, shorts, shun, silhouettes, silver, simmons, simplicity, singer, skating, sledding, snacks, soccer, software, solutions, spanish, spices, sports, spreads, spring, squash, stanley, stones, storage, strings, summer, sunbeam, sunshine, survivor, swimming, switch, tang, tape, target, taxes, tech, teens, television, tennis, textbook, textbooks, thanks, theater, thomas, timex, toner, tools, topics, torino, toys, training, transformers, travel, trinity, triumph, truck, trucks, trump, tuna, tuttle, tv, twilight, umbra, universal, university, unlocked, upgrade, urban, used, verve, video, vikings, vinyl, vivo, viz, volleyball, vs, wallace, warner, watches, waterskiing, weber, werner, west, westinghouse, wheeled, wheels, wiley, winds, wire, wireless, wood, woodworking, wrangler, wrestling, write, xerox, yoga, zenith, microsoft

Product Pages

For some reason, Amazon has chosen to create shortcuts to individual products in their catalog. I found 100 shortcuts in this category.

america, apartment, arthur, badlands, balls, barrels, barry, beans, beats, body, bottom, brazil, breakaway, breakthrough, buckets, century, chaplin, chef, commitment, confidence, conversations, cookie, corner, cracker, dash, dating, deadline, deceit, details, dow, drawing, dungeon, eades, earl, espionage, evolve, excel, fish, fit, garcia, gunslinger, hillman, hive, icon, inclusion, indispensable, inspire, intrusion, israel, joss, kimball, kindle, leo, loopholes, millionaire, mira, mummy, noel, nostradamus, nourish, oasis, organizing, oyster, palmer, paralysis, passion, passionate, peacock, persuasion, poe, portfolio, presence, profitable, prosper, revved, santa, sarah, screenplay, seal, self, selling, service, ship, sloan, spies, startup, stocks, stranger, swimsuit, talent, toxic, traveler, waste, we, whistle, wind, winners, wired, wizard, wolves

Sports Team Pages

I found 178 custom pages dedicated to products related to sports or sports teams.

aggies, akron, alabama, angels, arizona, arkansas, army, arsenal, athletics, auburn, avalanche, baylor, bears, bills, blues, bradley, braves, brewers, broncos, brown, bucks, buffalo, buffaloes, bulls, butler, cal, california, campbell, capitals, cardinals, centenary, charleston, chiefs, cincinnati, citadel, colorado, colts, connecticut, cornell, cowboys, coyotes, creighton, cubs, dartmouth, davidson, delaware, devils, dodgers, dolphins, drake, drexel, ducks, duke, eagles, evansville, flames, florida, flyers, georgetown, georgia, giants, hampton, hartford, harvard, hawaii, hawks, heat, hoops, houston, howard, idaho, illinois, indiana, indians, iowa, irish, islanders, jacksonville, jets, kansas, kentucky, kings, lafayette, lamar, liberty, lightning, lions, longhorns, louisville, magic, maine, manhattan, marquette, marshall, maryland, massachusetts, mavericks, memphis, mercer, mets, miami, michigan, minnesota, mississippi, missouri, monmouth, montana, nationals, navy, nebraska, nets, nevada, niagara, northeastern, northwestern, ohio, oilers, oklahoma, orange, oregon, orioles, pacers, pacific, packers, panthers, patriots, pennsylvania, phillies, pirates, pistons, pittsburgh, portland, princeton, providence, raiders, rangers, rays, reds, rice, richmond, rider, rockets, rockies, saints, senators, sharks, southern, spurs, stanford, stars, steelers, stetson, suns, syracuse, temple, tennessee, texans, texas, tigers, titans, tulane, tulsa, twins, ucla, utah, vermont, virginia, volunteers, wagner, warriors, washington, wild, winthrop, wisconsin, wyoming, xavier, yale, yankees

Search Pages

14 pages are shortcuts for product searches.

bowman, browning, buckley, choose, converse, curling, lauder, olympic, pickup, plot, poker, razor, rink, slugger, steiner, thermostat, thermostats, wilson

Website

20 additional shortcuts send users to pages not on the primary www.amazon.com domain.

affiliates, associates, auction, cell, de, developer, fresh, investor, meters, news, phrase, phrased, phrasemaking, phraseology, phrases, pr, press, queue, soap, wine

Special

114 shortcuts defied categorization. They are generally special features of the Amazon web site.

access, advantage, agreement, anywhere, atonement, audible, bach, bank, barney, bill, birthday, blacks, cancel, capote, card, cards, cart, chronicle, claim, claims, classics, communications, connect, contact, coop, current, dad, daily, deals, delivers, direct, directory, discover, education, environment, episodes, feedback, garage, gifts, goldberg, greenwood, habitat, hd, heart, help, holiday, honor, horton, howell, images, inaugural, inauguration, international, jaws, journeys, kaplan, labels, library, lippincott, locker, marketing, marketplace, martian, mcgraw, mobile, mom, montreux, morningstar, nolo, nonprofit, occasions, orders, packaging, passes, password, phone, pin, pioneer, prime, privacy, productivity, publishers, push, quiver, refunds, reporting, return, returns, rewards, search, sell, shades, sos, sox, spa, studios, summons, tags, ted, today, tracking, trading, usability, valentine, vault, visa, visual, vote, wastewater, waters, wedding, wishes, zen, zing

Other

Perhaps most interestingly, I found 68 shortcuts that no longer seem to function specially (they default to the home page), or they reference a secured page not intended for Amazon customers

alerts, alien, ash, awards, beta, blocks, board, brooks, buick, community, credit, dell, documents, egghead, errors, es, evening, exec, favorites, fiesta, friends, game, ginger, go, ibm, input, java, join, lifetime, local, manage, mutter, new, orchestras, phantom, preferences, profile, recommendations, reminders, review, reviews, schwab, sellers, star, status, store, tag, text, traffic, wolf, yellow,
anniversary, communities, continue, damages, dexter, discussion, discussions, dylan, forum, forums, japan, japanese, links, madonna, mae, patents, supernatural

Exhaustive List of URL Shorteners

Go2.me started as a small hobby project, and has grown in scope as I've found many possible features to add.

There are a wide variety of Link Shorteners in the market today. The first products appeared in 2001, and people have used them to shorten 100's of millions of URL's to date. With the advent of micro-blogging sites, like Twitter, the demand for URL shorteners has grown even greater.

TinyURL is the first URL Shortener to gain wide popularity. Started in 2002 by Kevin "Gilby" Gilbertson, TinyURL remains the single most popular URL Shortening service, with a claimed 145 million links shortened to date, and 1.5 billion clicks per month (nearly 600 per second) on their shortened links (as of January, 2009).

There are a number of reasons why people are using URL Shorteners:

• Fixing Links - Original links may be too long to fit on a single line in an email message, causing some email clients to wrap them, making the link unusable.
• Beautifying Links -Original links are long and ugly - a shorter one looks better in email or IM messages.
• Space requirements - Twitter messages only allow 140 characters - long URL's won't fit, or don't allow enough explanatory text to accompany a shared link.
• Spam and Phishing - Spammers sometimes use URL Shorteners to disguise the true destination of a link. They can claim it will take a reader to one destination, when if fact it goes to another. This can make it more difficult for spam filters to recognize spam messages, and can also fool users into falling for a phishing scheme.
• Link Tracking - Individuals and marketers who are sharing links, often like to know how many people are clicking their link, or know what site people are clicking from.

TinyURL defined the baseline functionality by which we can judge follow on competitors. As an early entrant, the feature set is basic, with a couple advanced features.

• Redirection - Redirects from a short URL back to the original.
• Web Form - Type a link into a web form to shorten it.
• Custom Alias - Select your own text (if available) for a tiny link (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/blog-go2me.
• Bookmarklet - Install a bookmarklet to create a short URL from the current page.
• Relative Redirection - TinyURL links can be appended by additional URL path text to redirect to a "sub page" of the original shortned URL.
• Link Preview - Turn on preview mode (remembered by cookie) to display the target link BEFORE redirecting to it (used to confirm link is not spam, adult, or phishing).
• API - TinyURL supports a simple web request that will return the tiny URL from a long link - very simple but it works for many applications, for example Twhirl.

In a future post, I'll review the most popular (stand-alone) URL Shorteners (and throw in a comparison to the Go2.me service as well); sites that do URL shortening as an added feature (e.g., FriendFeed's "ff.im") will not be considered.

"Complete" List of URL Shorteners

The following list is EVERY URL shortener I have found to date (and I'll update it as I find more - if you know of additional shorteners, please send mail to shortener@go2.me). As a measure of their relative popularity, they are listed in order of their published Alexa Ranking (most as or Jan 2009, but some updated in Apr 2009). The sites that are highlighted will be the subject of my next post - a competitive review of the features of the most popular URL Shorteners.

Update 1: I've estimated the number of Tweets per Day that each service is being used to send. The front runners on the list are sorted by that statistic, rather than Alexa rank as it seems a purer measure of popularity.

Update 2: Twitter Rate numbers from May 2009 - also showing relative change in rank of each shortener from last statistics in April.

Update 3: Updated June 11, 2009. Note Stumble Upon's new shortener su.pr is already getting lots of mentions on twitter, even though it's still in limited beta.

The LAST Update: I'm going to post updated stats in a fresh blog posts from now on.

Thanks to Chris Koss for doing the competitive research for this post.

Three Must-Have Bookmarking Tools

I'm amazed at people who get by just using their browser to surf the web without any 3rd party tools for saving and sharing bookmarks. For anybody that visits a lot of web sites, and wants to share them with friends and co-workers, I find three web sites to be invaluable (full disclosure - I worked on 2 of the 3 products - but I genuinely love what they do for me).

1. 

   Faves.com - Faves is a Social Bookmarking web site. Which means, it allows me to save Bookmarks I find interesting in my own on-line database. I primarily use Faves for two reasons: a) I can save web sites for myself for easy recall in the future, and b) sharing interesting things I find with my friends and family (and by sharing - I mean this is a two-way street; I find cool stuff for them, and they expose me to cool stuff they find). Faves has a really good built-in search engine so I can quickly find any Fave I've saved in the past (over 6,000 of them so far!) - or even search across the bookmarks all my friends have saved.

   Faves is one of the first places I go to look for a recommendations for a resource on the web, or even product recommendations from my friends. Faves also sports a Facebook application, so my friends on Facebook get notified when I share something, as well as friends who are also using Faves directly.

2. 

   Go2.me - Go2.me is a link shortening service with a twist; it not only can convert any long URL into a very short one (just 16 characters long), it creates a landing page where you and your friends can exchange comments. If you share links with friends over Twitter or email, you don't really know how many people are actually visiting your link, or have a good way to have a conversation about that link. Go2.me adds a wrapper around your shared page that shows you the number of visitors, and allows them to leave comments for you.

3. 

   Foxmarks - Unlike the socially oriented tools, above, Foxmarks is a great utility for roaming your very frequently used bookmarks. Since I frequently use 4 different computers, Foxmarks can synchronize my Bookmarks toolbar across all of my machines. I have about 30 sites that I go back to over and over again in the course of my day - this way I can organize my Bookmark toolbar in one way, and Foxmarks will propogate my changes to each of my machines. You can also access your bookmarks directly from the web, if you are traveling and using a computer at a hotel, library, or Internet cafe.

   I'm a pretty new convert to Foxmarks; the setup was really simple, and it even did a decent job of merging the disparate collection of bookmarks I had on three separate machines.

All of these tools are free - hopefully they'll make your Internet usage a richer and more productive experience. Feel free to add recommendations for other Bookmark-related tools in the comments.

Introducing G02.ME

Origins of G02.ME

The G02.ME project was started at a Google Hack-a-Thon in Seattle in August of 2008. I wanted to develop a project I could "implement in a day" - and at least have something basic working. Since I had just purchased the domain "g02.me" (yes, I have a domain acquisition habit), why not implement another TinyURL clone?

[BTW, G02.ME is spelled "G-ZERO-TWO-DOT-ME" - though I pronounce it "GO TO ME"]

TinyURL and the History of URL Shortening Services

For those not familiar with TinyURL, it's a URL shortening service. For a variety of reasons, people often want to send URL's (web links) to friends, but the original is too long. Sites like TinyURL create an alias to the original URL that is much shorter, so they can be sent in email or IM messages much more easily.

The original TinyURL was created by Kevin "Gilby" Gilbertson in 2002. In this interview in 2006, he was asked about his plans for the site. ZDNet reporter, David Berlind, thought there could be a lot of business potential behind sites like his, but Gilby seemed reluctant to piss off his user base by selling out to commercial interests. Gilby had a long list of features he wanted to implement, but he doesn't seem to have progressed on that much over the last 2 years.

Today there are an explosion of TinyURL competitors, each with a different set of features (in a future blog post, I will try to provide a detailed feature comparison of the field). The most popular I've found are:

• TinyURL (Alexa 880)
• snipurl.com (Alexa 10,953)
• ShortURL (Alexa 13,904)
• Metamark (Alexa 23,617)
• bit.ly (Alexa 24,350)
• notlong Alexa 29,682)
• is.gd (Alexa 33,617)

Goals and Features of G02.ME

The primary purpose of G02.ME was to help me become more familiar with the Google App Engine platform, as well as be an experimental playground for me to explore some ideas I've had about building web services and user interfaces.

The features that differentiate G02.ME from TinyURL are:

• G02.ME directs users to a page that has an Info Panel above the main site page. The info panel allows you to get information about the page, and interact with other users that are visiting the G02.ME shortened link.
• G02.ME displays Analytics about the link, including the number of times it's been viewed, and how many times people have shared the link with others.
• G02.ME allows anyone to add comments in the Info Panel to encourage discussing and interaction around the link you're sharing. For the moment, these are all public comments, which can be contributed anonymously or credited to your chosen user name.
• G02.ME allows you to associate tags with a given link. You can then visit a tag summary page that displays all the links that have been associated with that tag.
• G02.ME calculates the current popularity of every link in real-time. By visiting the G02.ME home page you can see which links have been shared, viewed, and commented on the most. I'll describe the popularity algorithm in more detail in a future post.
• G02.ME has a rich JSON API. Virtually all the data and updates can be scripted via a REST/JSON API to the service.

Product Design Philosophy

The design elements I wanted to explore in the creation of G02.ME are:

• Keep the user interface spare and clean. Maximize the amount of information and functionality, but keep the use of extraneous visual elements to a minumum (this goal is partially driven by the fact that this is a one-man project, and I have limited design skills).
• I wanted to see how far I could go by using a text-entry centric design. G02.ME basically has a command line interface. Users have to learn a data entry format for comments that let them create a user name, and add free-form tags to their links. I have a fundamental belief that humans are very adaptable, and that they can be taught to learn any interface. Text-based interfaces are also quite efficient and fast to use. So, while it will appeal to a more geeky audience, G02.ME provides a lot of power within a single text input box.
• G02.ME is also an open source project. I'm developing G02.ME in real-time and exposing the source code as I develop it. Firstly, I like this form of incremental improvement - shipping features frequently, and (hopefully) getting feedback from users to drive further improvements. Secondly, I hope that other developers can learn from this as a sample project in seeing how I've tackled problems in the App Engine environment.

Future Goals and Features

G02.ME has been a bit of a distraction from a larger project I started last year (PageForest). But there are still a few features to add and bugs to fix before I set it aside and return my focus to PageForest. I hope to get feedback here on this blog or as posted issues on the open source project. I would even invite contributions from other developers if anyone is so inclined.

The following features are on my immediate task list:

• Site Security - Today, G02.ME has a completely open/anonymous user interface - there is no need to create a registered account. I'll be offering the option to register, and thereby provide some security for your personal data (now your comments can be deleted by other users). I also have more work to do to secure the JSON API from abuse.
• Tag Cloud - I'll be adding ranking to tags and displaying the most frequently used tags on the home page.
• More Analytics - I want to show more about where users are coming from when they click on a G02.ME link. I can also display some information about whether sites are trending up or down in popularity.

Thanks for reading this far! I hope you'll at least give G02.ME a try. Please use it in your twitter posts and invite your friends to use it as well!