Sep 10 / Yusuf

Why Bit.ly is the most used URL shortener on twitter

Some weeks ago, i made a guest post titled Ten short URLs to make long URLs shorter at HashZero.com, which is Kishore’s blog on software and web stuff. It basically listed ten websites that offer URL shortening services for publishers to use for quick linking to long URL pages.

According to that post, my first website on the list was TinyURL.com and second was Bit.ly and the list went on.

On to the topic now; Pingdom is a company has a “focus that lies on covering the uptime monitoring needs of 90% of the companies in the world” – according to their website.

At their blog, i read an interesting entry on their study and findings on URL shorterners/redirectors titles “URL shortener speed and reliability shootout”

They made a comprehensive study on the top players in URL redirection such as Bit.ly, TinyURL, Ow.ly, Is.gd, Su.pr, Snipurl, Cli.gs, Tr.im and Twurl and presented their findings on two major factors being overhead when accessing websites and Forwarding reliability (uptime).

Of course, you could think the study should have been made over a span of time(in weeks). They made the study from July 16, 2009 – August 16, 2009. Here are the results, courtesy Pingdom.

Results for added overhead for accessing an URL

and

Results for Forwarding reliability for URL shorteners, July 16, 2009 – August 16, 2009


URL Shortener	Uptime	Estimated downtime in a year (hours)
Ow.ly	100.00%	0.0
Bit.ly	99.98%	1.8
Su.pr	99.97%	2.6
TinyURL	99.96%	3.5
Is.gd	99.94%	5.3
Snipurl	99.87%	11.4
Cli.gs	99.60%	35.0
Twurl	99.53%	41.2
Tr.im	99.10%	78.8

So, the results are to see and decide which shortener you are going to use for publishing on your blog/twitter.

No wonder, bit.ly is the most used URL shortener on twitter by many alike. Also, Bit.ly offers loads of features like link info, detailed visitor stats etc..

Here is another finding. Twitter has their own link count which you would be able to see on your browser’s address bar for a split second when you click on a link from a twitter page. It would something like : http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FrxwqU&linkType=web&tweetId=3735024666&userId=-1

&authenticity_token=c2bb606ab2dbf45f3a74bd06fbf18e37ec5dc287

Guess Twitter made that to count the number of clicks that are made on a twitter page?!?. As of yet, I do not know. This would add to the overhead too, according to Hector Danniel’s post on Experimentando con Twitter y los acortadores de URL’s. Yes, of course it would!.

Well, its in Spanish, here is the translated page : Experimenting with Twitter and the shortened URL’s. He makes some good points to note, like the loss of revenue and users because of a millisecond delay in loading of the website.

A good excerpt from his post :

But more surprising is that the Twitter link_click_count adds 900 ms to load bit.ly causing a delay of 1089 ms. This is not unusual considering that Twitter is not exactly the fastest site on the planet.

Here is his findings for a very simple test made by shortening http://www.google.com with bit.ly and posting on twitter. Loading times were noted with the Hammerhead Firebug Add-on for Firefox.