URL shorteners, which allow users to condense long Web addresses, are a dime an oddly named dozen.
The tools, which have been soaring in popularity thanks to sites like Twitter and Tumblr where every character counts, have been competing in a popularity contest with no clear victors.
But one service, Bit.ly has pulled ahead of the others, at least on Twitter.
According to data collected by TweetMeme, a service that compiles the most popular links shared through Twitter, Bit.ly is now used for 46 percent of all the abbreviated links shared through the microblogging platform. TinyURL, the granddaddy of URL shorteners, trails with 44 percent. By comparison, in late March, Tweetmeme calculated that TinyURL made up 75 percent of shared links and Bit.ly, 13 percent.
The big reason for the change in market share: Twitter recently changed its default link shortener from TinyURL, a tool developed in 2002, to Bit.ly.
Twitter, which had no formal partnership with TinyURL, has remained mum on why it made its decision, but it may have swapped its default services because of outages at TinyURL, which rendered unusable the short links provided by the service. Bit.ly says it has multiple layers of redundancy and is establishing an archive to help counter downtime.
Reliability is especially important if Twitter starts indexing links shared through its service, as CNet reported Wednesday.
In addition, Bit.ly, which recently raised $2 million in venture financing, tracks real-time statistics on how many times links are clicked and where users are coming from — information that could be valuable to companies and brands looking to measure the impact of an e-mail message, link, tweet or mention online.
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