"I was there for the great URL shortening war of aught-nine," we'll tell our grandchildren. "Tryin' times they were … Facebook had plenty of status but had only just turned cash flow positive, while Google reigned supreme…"
Well, perhaps not! Truth is though, that 2009 marked some pretty remarkable upheavals in the world of URL shorteners. Today we look at some of the major developments of the year.
Twitter dumps TinyURL
Poor old TinyURL got ditched in 2009, by one of the services that has the greatest use for a URL shortener. Twitter decided to change from the internet's oldest URL shortening service, to one of the best managed and most comprehensively featured ones, bit.ly. Bit.ly is sort of an inside job at Twitter; Betaworks is the startup accelerator behind Twitter, and also counts bit.ly among its projects.
TinyURL said to be worth $46 million
Before the great dumping occurred, TinyURL's worth was estimated by Techcrunch at around $46 million. Unfortunately, it seems that without a revamp of the web address of tinyurl itself, it stands little chance of gaining ground again. Shorter is always better, and tinyurl was launchedi nthe days before you had the choice to use anything except .com, .net, etc in your URL. So, TinyURL has addresses with http://tinyurl.com, while the new school offerings are much shorter.
Facebook, Google and Youtube get on board
After all the Twitter-fiasco dust had settled, Facebook and Google both announced that they were launching their own URL shortening services. While Google's could be used only on some Google platforms, and Facebook was mostly for Facebook pages, and Youtube's was ONLY for Youtube videos … we still saw articles across the web trumpeting bit.ly's demise. Whether the three big services will do much to the more flexible URL shorteners is yet to be determined, but it doesn’t look like the impact will be that great.
The standout newcomers
Along with the rise of bit.ly, a range of new URL redirection alternatives came to prominence. Among these was http://ity.im, one of the simplest and the best URL shorteners. It offers browser bookmarklets and shortening with a custom alias, and is beginning to build quite a user community with a responsive admin and development team.
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