Twitter To Launch Their Own URL Shortener Soon (And Won’t Be Giving Users A Choice)
Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at
9:16 am
Twitter CEO Evan Williams on Twitter’s lack of an internal URL shortener:
“We want to solve that problem. Everyone else has solved that problem. We are probably not going to give people a choice. If they want to use a different shortener, they can use a different app.”
Ouch. Is this the end for bit.ly? Or is this undeniably insular (and dare I say, Apple-worthy) attitude simply going to drive more people away from Twitter.com in favour of clients like TweetDeck and (assuming they open the barn door a little) HootSuite?
Source: TechCrunch
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Can't really say, as I barely use their web site to post my tweets anyway. Those who still religiously use the site rather than an app probably don't care about which URL shortener they use anyway (if they even know to use one to begin with).
Can't really say, as I barely use their web site to post my tweets anyway. Those who still religiously use the site rather than an app probably don't care about which URL shortener they use anyway (if they even know to use one to begin with).
“Not give people a choice” in that only Twitter's shortener will be available for shortening, or prohibiting people from posting text containing links shortened elsewhere? The former makes perfect sense; the latter, none at all.
I remember one time bit.ly went down for a significant amount of time, and Twitter was rendered basically unusable. For that reason, this move by Twitter makes good sense. As far as not giving users a choice, I can't say that I see any problem with that. The web interface is like their own client, right? And they have a right to do with it what they want, the same as some clients automatically use a specific url shortener for you, too. I don't see anything to get upset about… unless you own or work for bit.ly, but even then, didn't Twitter try to buy bit.ly ? They probably mentioned that if bit.ly didn't go for it, they'd make their own url shortener. So, bit.ly probably had the opportunity to decide if it wanted to continue existing without Twitter traffic, and that's what it decided to do.
For the what is it, 64% of users that still use Twitter.com last I checked to tweet, this move will be fine for them. As long as it doesn't hamper other URL shortening services, I say, the more the merrier….