TinyURL vs. Bitly: Web Remains Not For Those Flat of Foot

In a MapQuest-like display of flat-footedness, the original URL-shortener TinyURL seems on the cusp of being crushed by the new kid in town, Bit.ly.



To me, it happened overnight. One day everyone was using TinyURL on Twitter, the next Bitly. As it turns out, that wasn't an accident as I learned in this TechCrunch story, URL Shortening Wars: Twitter Ditches TinyURL for Bitly. It seems that Summize (subsequently acquired by Twitter and now Twitter Search) and Bitly are backed by the same entity, Betaworks, which also has common investors with Twitter.

So my gut says the story goes something like:

• Hey, we're driving a lot of traffic for TinyURL
• Maybe we should get that traffic ourselves
• I bet we could get Twitter to make us the default URL shortener
• And -- this part's also key -- I bet we could do it better

Hence I wasn't surprised to start reading stories in the past two days about Bitly's big vision. See, for example, this TechCrunch story, Bitly's Grand Plans, and Their Inevitable Clash with Digg: Bitly Now.

Excerpt:

The magic behind Bit.ly are the stats that the service makes available on the underlying domains being clicked. Investor John Borthwick explained it all to investors in an email we obtained earlier this month:

bit.ly has been on a tear since we launched it last summer ...bit.ly is on its surface a link or URL shortener, helping people take long and unwieldy links and make them short and easy to share via email, Twitter, Facebook etc. But once you shorten a link with bit.ly the fun begins. You can put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link and see, real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around these social distribution networks.

Bit.ly Now will take all of this deep (and wide) data on popular real time URLs and turn it into a service. That’s where the inevitable clash with Digg comes in.

Bitly, as it turns out, think it has some key advantages against Digg, reminding me that the web is also not for those bad at math.

Bit.ly says that the data flow they are seeing is so massive that they are getting very good at predicting the number of clicks a link will get in the future. They look at acceleration of clicks as well as the source (Facebook, Twitter, IM, whatever) and whether people are clicking that are outside of the social graphs of other people clicking.

In other words, you could say that Bit.ly knows what will be on the Digg home page tomorrow.

The amazing thing, from a strategic marketing perspective, is that TinyURL has been written out of the story. By looking ahead towards Digg as the new competition, by painting a vision of where it wants to go, by discussing how it wants to get there, Bitly just blows by TinyURL and writes them out of the story line. This isn't about URL shortening; it's about information sharing and communications.

Well done! I sometimes call this Lot's Wife's Law of Marketing Communications: don't look back; only look ahead.

The lesson for TinyURL is that you can't remain static, or someone will come along, reinvent you with a broader vision, and paint you out of the picture -- turning you, if you will, into the pillar of salt.