Twitter – the tide raises all boats

I carried out a simple experiment: grab a good chunk of Twitter data; pull out all the URLs, rank the domains and then track the trends in Compete.com. Below is the head of the list.

Rank	Domain	Monthly Growth	People
1	tinyurl.com	21.6%	4.5M
2	bit.ly	48.8%	1.2M
3	twitpic.com	54.6%	2.4M
4	is.gd	21.8%	0.7M
5	ff.im	25.5%	0.2M
6	twurl.nl	29.4%	0.3M
7	ow.ly	85.3%	0.6M
8	blip.fm	18.3%	0.3M
9	tumblr.com	14.8%	2.3M
10	plurk.com	19.9%	0.3M
11	tr.im	63.0%	0.4M
12	cli.gs	38.7%	0.3M

The data seems conclusive: cli.gs is definitely the  URL shortening service with the weirdest name.

Comments

[Dave Steckler]

Yep. "Short urls with analytics", is their (cli.gs) tagline.

I also looked up "clig" on urbandictionary and, luckily for them (?), it is not defined yet.

[Abdur]

How can we argue with conclusions like that. :)

[Sam Johnston]

Forget URL shorteners... letting sites set their own short links is a much better idea. My money's on rel="shortlink" because I haven't found any flaws yet - *all* of the earlier proposals (including my own) have varying degrees of deficiency.

Basically by specifying a short link (e.g. http://example.com/promo or http://example.com/123) in the HTML and/or HTTP headers, Twitter clients et al will be able to "resolve" a URL back to something short and sensible.

Sam

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[Shu]

I suspect cligs is a play on the word clicks. Would you know how long each url shortener has been around?

[Fire]

The readable here is a good one I also found the post

http://theheadsetshop.com

I would tend to agree with the authors making stable points.