Chris Alexander

On Engineering

URL Shorteners

Simple is best

14th April, 2010

So there’s news around on tech blogs about Bit.ly getting a re-design and some new features.

If you can call them “features”, that is. Here’s a selection:

Umm… great?

As a commenter on the TechCrunch post about this said:

This is a small feature masquerading as a company.

Building a business out of this kind of thing and not making use of the massive amounts of data you have available is shocking. If my only business was shortening links, I would be doing everything I could to be retrieving every possible piece of information about the pages themselves, where the link is shared, who clicks through the link and so on. That’s the only value you have out of having such a dominant market share, and capitalising on it will make or break the company.

If you want something quick and simple for shortening links, check out Retwt.me - it’s not trying to be a business and it keeps it simple.

Breaking: from Twitter’s #chirp conference, @ev has just confirmed Twitter will be implementing its own URL shortener - so it can grab all this data that Bit.ly is currently getting out of Twitter. They kinda had it coming.