You might think that URL shortening services have been around for ages, from tinyurl.com, tr.im, url.ie to bit.ly. They allow you to shrink a url to a very few characters making it easier to share it with others via email, instant messenger, and most commonly twitter.
They take any long URL and assign it a unique shorter url on their own server made up of random characters (although some allow you to assign a non-random short URL). When a visitor follows the link, they are immediately forwarded to the original URL.
Why would a company provide this service, which implicitly has no opportunity for advertising and little brand awareness? The answer is ‘data’. By providing these links they are inserting themselves into the process of link sharing and can therefore see what is being shared and what is popular. They can also see who the most influential link sharers are.
You can get a glimpse of the data that the link shorteners gather and the power of it because bit.ly actually make it all public for us to use. Take any link, for example, this one (http://bit.ly/eAYlz) recently tweeted by Stephen Fry, add a ‘+’ on to the end (http://bit.ly/eAYlz+) and you get to see how many people followed the link, who re-shared this link, how it was shared (IM, email, twitter, etc) and where they were.
Powerful stuff.
