Webware

It has only been a week since MySpace launched its two-way sync with Twitter, but already the service has made an impact on the popular microblog.

MySpace's "lnk.ms" is now the second most used link-shortening service on Twitter, according to statistics compiled by Twitter link tracker Tweetmeme.

Over the past 24 hours, lnk.ms was included in 15.66 percent of all tweets containing links, Tweetmeme claims. It follows only Bitly, which was used in more than 69 percent of tweets featuring links to outside sources. TinyURL, Owly, and Isgd follow MySpace's lnk.ms with 10.43 percent, 2.75 percent, and 2 percent share of tweets, respectively.

MySpace hasn't divulged how many users are syncing with Twitter. A company spokeswoman told me in an e-mail message that MySpace cannot provide any details on usage yet. Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The fact that MySpace has been able to make such a mark on Twitter in just one week is quite a feat. When the company announced two-way syncing with Twitter last week, it allowed users of both social networks to update their status and syndicate that to the other network. MySpace's lnk.ms is the result of that.

Whenever a user who has activated two-way syncing updates their MySpace status, a snippet of that update is syndicated to their Twitter profile. A unique lnk.ms link follows that tweet. When the user's Twitter followers click on it, they can view the full status update. If the updates are kept private, the update can't be viewed by followers who aren't also friends with the user on MySpace.

Before we get too carried away over the success of MySpace's link-shortening feature, it should be noted that Tweetmeme's calculations are based only on links it processes. Also, the company tracks link-shortening usage over the past 24 hours, so we have yet to see how MySpace's service will fare in the long run.

But so far, it seems that MySpace has made its mark on the service. And by the looks of things, it doesn't seem the Twitter community's use of lnk.ms will be slowing down anytime soon.

(Via TechCrunch)

This post has been corrected from the original. See fifth paragraph.

Short URL powerhouse Bitly is baking into its Web service the Yfrog picture-sharing service made by Imageshack. Yfrog competes with other Twitter-friendly image-sharing services such as Twitpic.

For users who want to create easy short links to images they upload from their computers, this will be a bit of a time-saver. Also, users will get the real-time click through data from their images on the Bitly site.

Imageshack CEO Jack Levin says that his 11-person company services 3 billion images a day. That's the highest hit-per-employee ratio in Silicon Valley, he boasts. He also says that Imageshack has, due to its tenure, a larger and more stable infrastructure than competitors.

I find it interesting that a service that I thought treated all sites equally--I'm talking about Bitly here--would make a deal clearly favoring a particular source. Of course, Twitter itself gave Bitly its big break when it baked the URL shortener into Twitter itself, replacing TinyURL. Benevolence, or favoritism, depending on how you look at it, flows downhill.

Levin agrees that deals like this are "Web politics" but is happy to have what is for now unique placement on the Bitly service. This post has been corrected from the original, in which it was stated that the Yfrog arrangement was an exclusive deal. Bitly CEO John Borthwick sent in this correction: "If users like it, other photo sites will be included."

The image-upload feature should go live on the Bitly page at the end of the month.

Bitly also announced on its blog that Google Reader and Typepad now generate Bitly links natively.

Previously: As the URL burns: The short-link soap opera.

Disclosure: Bitly and CBS, CNET's parent company, have partnered to create branded short links for CBS News. CNET itself has no partnership with Bitly.

Also shortens sex-negative links.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

At first glance, this sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Sex writer Violet Blue has launched a new URL shortening service, Vbly (found at Vb.ly), called "the Internet's first and only sex-positive URL shortener."

This means that Vbly has a different policy than other shorteners. Blue, and Vbly creator Ben Metcalfe, encourage the use of this service for creating links to adult sites and other "NSFW" links. They do not run their links through filters, as the market-leading Bitly (found at Bit.ly) does. Although, as Blue says. "I think we'd remove links if we were asked to by a court or if we were made aware of anything involving illegal activity."

I suggested to Blue and Metcalfe that the open policy of Vbly would lead to a ton of spam links, a problem that led to the shut-down of URL shorteners like URLtea and Qurl. Metcalfe replied, "One person's spam might be another person's genuine interest. And if someone wants to create a Vbly link that points to their 'buy Viagra' Web site, that's fine and up to them. It doesn't particularly matter if we get a ton of those--it's not going to adversely affect the site either technically or commercially."

Bitly puts roadblocks in front of suspicious links.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

As is being done with Trim (found at Tr.im), the Vbly creators wants to open-source the service. "We'd like to make the entire database available for anyone to inspect," said Metcalfe. "There's a ton of cool and exciting things developers...can do with this." The Vbly API is already published and the code will be open source. However, unlike Trim, which creator Eric Woodward wants the community to actually run, Blue and Metcalfe will run the Vbly servers, the same way other open-source projects are commercially hosted.

How necessary is an unfiltered and open URL shortener? Todd Levy, VP of Product at Bitly, confirms that all links created on that service are run through a "series of blocklists," including Surbl and a Google list, but he says that "we never actually remove a link and we never prevent a link from being shortened." Rather, when a user clicks on a link that goes to a site on the blocklist, he or she will get an interstitial page warning them that the link is on a list, but allowing them to proceed to it if they wish.

The beginning of branded URL shorteners?

While I believe that all sites should create their own short URLs to take control of their own branding, it's possible that we're about to see the creation of more audience- or content-focused URL shorteners. Certainly, if Vbly is used as Blue and Metcalfe wish, it's quite likely that people will begin to associate Vbly links with adult content and will have certain expectations for those links when they click on them. Users might pause before clicking on a Vbly link at work.

But it's possible that Vbly will show us that there's room in the market for focused shorteners. For example, there may actually be a business model for the creation of a family-friendly URL shortener that could guarantee that links are safe for kids.

Eric Woodward, creator of the short URL service Tr.im, painted his product into a corner when he announced first, that he was going to take it offline, and then a few days later that he wasn't. Nobody wants to trust their Web links to a capricious business that could go offline again, and take working links and traffic with it.

On August 17, Woodward put a fresh coat on the prior week's drama with a new gambit: He said he was giving the service to the community. In the bitter post announcing this plan, he continued to claim that due to the fact that Twitter made Bit.ly the default URL shortener for the service, a product like Tr.im has no real chance for success. Related, he says, is the recent announcement of the 301works archive for short URLs, which he sees as a craven publicity stunt to boost Bit.ly, since the same people behind it are also running 301works.

Woodward says that the Internet needs an open link-shortening service, because the traffic data short URLs generates is too valuable to entrust to a single company. "You can't get the aggregate data on what's being shared in real time by everyone," he told me. "Twitter wants to become a real-time search engine, so the data Bit.ly is capturing is very valuable."

(Bit.ly data is currently wide open, at least on an individual URL basis. Simply append "+" to a Bit.ly link to get traffic stats on it. Woodward wants to see a "fire hose" of short URL data, however.)

A Twitter keiretsu?
Woodward does have reason to be envious and even suspicious of the Bit.ly-Twitter relationship, although it's difficult to draw the connection all the way to malfeasance on the part of the two companies. And it's hard to believe that his strident posturing will win him much support outside of a small group of the most zealous open-source boosters.

Several powerful companies in the Twitter ecosystem are inter-related. Bit.ly's CEO is John Borthwick, and Borthwick is also CEO of Betaworks. Betaworks helps build companies in the social-messaging space. It incubated Summize, the Twitter search engine Twitter acquired last year, and through that deal Betaworks remains connected to Twitter. Betaworks has also worked with Tweetdeck -- which also uses Bit.ly as the default link shortener. The company has several other Twitter (and Facebook) projects running right now. Suffice it to say that if you're in Betaworks' network, you've got great access to Twitter. If you're competing with a Betaworks portfolio company to get Twitter's attention, you've got a tough road ahead.

Betaworks is one of the drivers of the 301works short URL data project, and it's the relationship between Bit.ly and 301works that led Woodward to shun the project, at least for now. "There's nothing wrong with it in theory, but it doesn't solve the link rot problem," Woodward said. He added, "Why would I give them the publicity?"

In light of the near-shutdown of Tr.im--and the actual closing of URL shortening services like URLTea, Shurl.net, and Qurl.net--users of the URL shorteners still standing may wonder what's going to happen to their favorite services if they, too, go belly-up.

On Friday, Gnip is announcing that it's releasing a public database that will give URL shortening companies a place where they can archive or escrow their short URL directories, in the event their services shut down. The database would provide a way for another company to take over the services of the closed URL shortening service and keep the mapping of short-to-real Web links alive.

The database will live at 301works, a site owned by Betaworks, which is not coincidentally an investor in Bit.ly, Twitter, and Tweetdeck.

The 301works site will not, at least at first, be a live short URL servicing company. Rather, it will be just a database that collects the mapping of short URLs from the companies that make them. Under circumstances agreed to by the URL shortening companies and the 301works admins, portions of the database may be released to third parties when certain conditions are met--like a site shutting down for good or suffering a period of sustained downtime.

In other words, the 301works site will not be enough to resurrect the URL mappings of a short URL site that folds. It's just a repository of the data that a still-standing URL shortener could download and add to its own system, to keep a collection of short URLs alive.

Gnip CEO Eric Marcoullier says it's a "break-glass-in-case-of-emergency" product.

But Marcoullier sees the escrow project as more than just an emergency bank for the URL maps. URL shortening services represent bottlenecks and vulnerable failure points. "These services are still somewhat fragile," said Marcoullier, who hopes that the creation of the 301works database will serve to "socialize these short URL companies into making these linkages available to the public domain. Our hope is that cool things will now occur, and that this will be a forcing function to the other companies (that don't use the 301works database)."

He is hoping that the URL shortening industry, such as it is, begins to come together around this service, and that perhaps the conversation leads to some consolidation or cooperation so that the services become more robust, scalable, and survivable.

Gnip is providing the database at no charge (which is appropriate--it's about the simplest data structure I could imagine, and it will be hosted on Amazon.com's cloud servers), but Marcoullier said his company will benefit from the exposure the 301works project provides. "We'll be a good industry citizen," he said.

Companies onboard for the launch announcement include shorteners Adjix, Awe.sm, Bit.ly, Cligs, and URLizer. The service is set to launch in a few weeks.

Further reading:
URL shortening is hot--but look before you leap
The Perils of Short Links

URL shortening service Trim is reopening its doors, restoring service to both existing Trim links and the core of the site that lets users make new ones. A company blog post that details the change of plans says that the company will continue to run Trim "indefinitely" while a trustworthy buyer is sought out.

Trim originally began experiencing problems late last week as all of its shortened links stopped working for several hours. Then, over the weekend, the company announced that it would be shutting down come the end of December, taking all of its shortened links with it.

In Tuesday's announcement, the company reiterated that the move to shut down, then re-open was not a publicity stunt, nor will it ever change how the service handles URLs such as adding a framebar or interstitial advertising that forces users to wait, or click through an ad to get to the source link. Such options could bring in revenue, but the company says that would go against the very principals Trim was founded on.

The post also warns other link shortening services that the odds continue to be "stacked" against them with Twitter using competitor Bitly as the built-in link shortener. "This is a basic reality of challenging monopolies," it says. "This type of favoritism will become an issue for all Twitter developers."

While Trim had a heavy following, users may not be willing to come back to it without knowing when or if another company will buy it. It's also unclear how long parent company Nambu Network would be able to continue operating without a buyer, despite the offer to keep running it at a loss.

With so many URL shortening services out there, this was bound to happen to at least one of them: Trim is shutting down. According to a blog post by parent company Nambu Networks, it was an expensive and fruitless effort.

"We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential," the post read.

Those expenses may have been particularly encumbering recently, when the service, found at Tr.im, was hit by a denial-of-service attack last week that knocked it offline.

The blog post was tinged with more than a hint of bitterness. Twitter, the service that led to the explosion of URL shorteners as Web users needed to truncate lengthy addresses to fit into a 140-character space, has shown a clear preference for Trim rival Bitly. Twitter uses Bitly as its default URL shortener, and it's even been rumored that Twitter may acquire it altogether.

"Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double down and develop Tr.im further," the post read. "What is the point? With Bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, Tr.im will lose over (in) the long run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future."

What the company hasn't said: what will happen to existing Trim URLs? It's likely that Nambu Networks hasn't yet decided. If Trim is completely closed, that would mean that those shortened URLs would turn into broken links. It'd be possible to close it to new entries but keep existing ones, except that wouldn't solve the financial problem.

One commenter on the Trim blog post suggested that perhaps the service could live on in the form of an open-source project. But for now, its fate remains up in the air.

One of the myriad URL-shortening services out there, found at Tr.im, suffered an outage for some time Wednesday, rendering many links unable to redirect.

The service--which is owned by a start-up called the Nambu Network--believes hackers are to blame. "From this end it appeared we suffered a denial of service attack, and we took appropriate action to get the website back to full service," a Trim representative said to CNET News in an e-mail.

There's another, less likely possible culprit: Airline JetBlue hit one million Twitter followers on Wednesday, and announced a one day-only commemorative deal that would shave 20 percent off the cost of any flights booked through a promotional link. It used Trim as the URL shortener for the link in question, and acknowledged in its "JetBlue Cheeps" Twitter-deals account that heavy volume from the sale may have unexpectedly caused the outage.

Whether or not it was the JetBlue promotion that crippled Trim, there's a bigger-picture problem here: URL shorteners like TinyURL, Bitly, Owly, Isgd, and related offerings from Digg and StumbleUpon, are a huge deal when we've all grown accustomed to fitting stuff into 140-character fields. Some, like Bitly (which Twitter uses as its automatic link shortener and which has been talked up as a possible acquisition for the microblogging company) and Trim, offer some tracking data and analytics surrounding the links plugged into their systems.

But when one crashes, so do all the links associated with it. Or what happens if a URL shortener goes out of business altogether? There would be a whole lot of lost, broken links out there. Some very small URLs could have a very big impact on the organization of the Web.

This post was updated at 1:13 p.m. PT.

Here's a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It's just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links--just in case you're into that sort of thing.

Want to open up multiple URLs? Just drag your mouse over them with this handy extension.

(Credit: CNET)

Advanced users can utilize keyboard shortcuts to limit mouse work. For instance, holding down the control or shift button while creating a box means you can hop around a page of results--selecting the items you want to open or save, while skipping over others. The extension is also coded to ignore extra links on search pages, which keeps you from unintentionally opening up the cached and similar links on each result. This worked fine on Google and Bing, but not on Yahoo or Ask.

This extension is definitely worth keeping around because it does not interfere with normal, right-click behavior. My one hope is that future versions will forgo the options menu in place of a small pop-up, or slide-out menu that asks what you want to do with links after selecting them.

See also: Snap Links (which does the same thing, but has not been updated since February) and Selection Links.