Why Bit.ly may beat Digg

June 29, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

bitlyURL shortening services may seem trivial, but they’re a potential goldmine of information about what humans on the Internet, not automated bots, find valuable or at least interesting.

Compared to, say, Google Maps, the way a URL shortener works is blessedly simple: A human Web surfer or automated Web server gives Bit.ly a URL, for example http://www.verylongname.com/very_very_very_long_url.html.

In return, Bit.ly gives back a short URL that looks like this: http://bit.ly/YZLpD.

The user or server publishes the Bit.ly URL instead of the longer original, saving valuable space in a short update on Twitter or another social network.

At the same time, Bit.ly makes a note to itself that “YZLpd” should be translated to www.verylongname.com/very_very_very_long_url.html. Whenever a user clicks on the shortened URL, their browser sends a request to Bit.ly for, in this example, http://bit.ly/YZLpD. Bitly redirects the user’s browser to the long-form original URL on another site.

Earlier this year Bit.ly replaced Tinyurl.com as the service used by Twitter to automatically shrink long URLs inside its users’ tweets. Bit.ly’s auto-shortening lets Twitter users post links without overrunning Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Can you spot the potential business? As Twitter’s default shortener, Bit.ly collects an average 2 million new URLs per day — 100 times the number of URLs submitted to Digg. Bit.ly tracks 150 million clicks per week on its shortened URLs. The company wants you to think of those as votes, which would make Bit.ly one of the Net’s largest running polls on what is and isn’t interesting.

TechCrunch has confirmed the rumor that Bit.ly will soon go into competition against Digg and other user-generated-content sites with a service internally dubbed Bit.ly Now. Bit.ly claims its collected data can tell not only what’s popular right this second, but what’s about to blow up huge. Unlike Twitter’s trending topics list, which shows what’s being tweeted a lot, Bit.ly measures what links Twitter readers are actually clicking.

The most obvious way to monetize this information would be to sell it as an embeddable data stream for news sites — an automated ticker that shows what everyone’s clicking.

You can already see some of the data Bit.ly collects by adding a  ’+’ character onto the end of any Bit.ly URL. In the example shown here, I’ve gotten the Bit.ly Now listing for a photographer’s blog by editing http://bit.ly/info/8ckcT to http://bit.ly/info/8ckcT+. There’s surely a way to resell this info, too.

But can Bit.ly really replace Digg? TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington writes that “Digg has to constantly fight users who try to game the system.” If Bit.ly catches on as an arbiter of what’s hot or not, users will figure out ways to game Bit.ly, too.

Next Story: Yahoo shelving Maven Networks’ video platform
Previous Story: Steve Jobs returns to work at Apple

Bookmark and Share

Tags: ,

Photo of Paul Boutin

About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Mainly Bit.ly tells you how many people clicked on the link and when they did so. It also tells you how many other users submitted the link. The first two features cannot truly tell you how valuable or popular the link is. People will click on just about anything. Knowing how many times the link was submitted however is useful.
  • re the last sentence in your post - I agree. It should be easier to deal with since we're talking about a huge data set (the top URLs get a lot of clicks v. votes on Digg), but you are right. They will have their own problems to deal with for sure.
  • I agree that Bit.ly could potentially beat digg but it's a long shot. There are tons of services with access to important information that fail to present it in such a way that users can easily interact with it. I think thats one of the reasons digg has done so well: because users can interact with the data and see it displayed in a user friendly interface. I don't see Bit.ly beating digg in its ability to present information.
  • Facebook User
    Cool story.

    I've often wondered how many shortened urls bit.ly can generate using its strings of numbers and letters.
  • The number of retweets is far more important than the clicks themselves - Digg uses the number of votes instead of the number of clicks for a reason.

    Retweets are available to anyone wishing to use the api, not just bitly

    IMHO, building a sustainable business on url shortening in 2009 is ,like, abuse of technology