Twitter stepped-up its game big time last week with a tiny tweak: From now on, all links posted in tweets will be automatically shortened to 19 characters and wrapped in the “t.co” domain.
The result is that when anyone clicks on the links, they appear as traffic coming from Twitter.
Did Twitter just sentence those formerly-crucial third-party shorteners such HootSuite’s Owly and Bitly to death?
If Bitly CEO Peter Stern is worried, he sure isn’t showing it. Stern, a successful New York tech exec whose email client Zenbe was previously acquired by Facebook, joined up with Bitly in May of this year.
Since then, Bitly introduced custom domain shortening and recently acquired Twitterfeed, a service that allows publishers to automatically update their Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles with their latest content.
“Nothing is different for us,” Stern said in an email to TPM Tuesday. “We knew this was coming, our eyes have been wide open, and we have been planning for it.”
Stern noted that “before t.co migration hit full swing, Twitter was only 1/4 of our traffic…Bitly started out as a little project to enable sharing links on Twitter, its true, but it has wisely grown well beyond Twitter,” offering other products including a granular, real-time analytics tool and News.me, a social news iPad app.
Even when it comes to Twitter’s introduction of new features, Stern said Bitly remains the gold standard, offering “real value that t.co does not offer, free analytics and trusted content being two (we scour bitly links in real-time for malware and dangerous content, so users have grown to trust clicking on bitly links, even if they don’t know what they are.)
“Anyone who cares who clicks on their messages should use bitly, as t.co doesn’t offer back any data to the user.”
Stern did give Twitter a backhanded compliment for being “nice enough to keep us more or less in the loop as they continue to deploy. There have been few surprises, considering the extent of the change.”
Still, when we brought up Twitter’s infamously, increasingly contentious relationship with third-party clients, Stern admitted that his new company is going to have to be smart to succeed.
In his words: “Twitter is not doing anything wrong, but clearly their strategic interests have not been aligned with a Twitter ecosystem for years now…Bitly has its work cut out for it if it wants to grow, on the consumer side as well as the b2b side.”
He did, however, promise that “More URL-shortening specialness coming within a few weeks,” promising to elaborate on new products closer to the unveiling time.
With a healthy $9 million in financing raised as of late last year, the company sure isn’t in a bad place. But the question remains how it will continue to grow in the face of Twitter’s continuing efforts to be a one stop-shop for users and businesses, especially since Twitter confirmed it is building its own analytics tool.
