Most Used URLs Shortener on Twitter, January 2010
URLs shorteners are definitively a hot business right now: Twitter made them popular restricting the tweets to only 140 characters, and while developing a URLs shortener is pretty simple, the amount and quality of data that they can collect (e.g., number of time a URL has been clicked on) is amazing.
It is easy to imagine how big search engines like Google, Bing or Ask.com are interested in the click streams of these companies. Traditional search engines generally discover pages through crawling (which is getting increasingly more difficult due to the ever growing size of the web), with the expansion of Twitter and the data of Bit.ly, users will “report” the hot pages directly to them and clicks will tell their importance.
According to my studies, in January 2010 the Twitter crowd produced about 41 Million tweets per day and of those about 38% contained an URL. Pretty impressive, considering that a few months ago there were only 26 Million of tweets per day and 22% contained URLs.
The table below shows the top 100 most used URLs Shortener and their relative percentages of URLs in the Twitter stream for January 2010.
| Percentage #URLs | Service Name |
| 69.63% | bit.ly |
| 7.17% | tinyurl.com |
| 6.50% | ow.ly |
| 2.55% | url4.eu |
| 1.83% | is.gd |
| 1.82% | cli.gs |
| 1.42% | goo.gl |
| 1.05% | tl.gd |
| 0.74% | ff.im |
| 0.72% | 4sq.com |
| 0.51% | su.pr |
| 0.51% | j.mp |
| 0.44% | s1z.us |
| 0.42% | lnk.ms |
| 0.42% | wp.me |
| 0.36% | shar.es |
| 0.31% | tiny.cc |
| 0.25% | ping.fm |
| 0.23% | fb.me |
| 0.22% | digg.com |
| 0.21% | fwix.com |
| 0.20% | r2u.at |
| 0.19% | dlvr.it |
| 0.16% | tr.im |
| 0.13% | siga.st |
| 0.13% | post.ly |
| 0.13% | nxy.in |
| 0.12% | mnt.to |
| 0.11% | nyti.ms |
| 0.09% | ur1.ca |
| 0.07% | u.nu |
| 0.07% | 3.ly |
| 0.06% | fxn.ws |
| 0.06% | uol.com |
| 0.05% | kele.es |
| 0.05% | sbne.ws |
| 0.05% | flic.kr |
| 0.05% | p.gs |
| 0.05% | kl.am |
| 0.05% | ad.vu |
| 0.04% | blip.fm |
| 0.04% | idek.net |
| 0.04% | ur.ly |
| 0.04% | trim.su |
| 0.03% | eca.sh |
| 0.03% | url.ie |
| 0.03% | digs.by |
| 0.03% | tcrn.ch |
| 0.03% | fk.cm |
| 0.03% | htxt.it |
| 0.02% | moby.to |
| 0.02% | om.ly |
| 0.02% | minu.me |
| 0.02% | tgam.ca |
| 0.02% | icio.us |
| 0.02% | vur.me |
| 0.02% | uurl.in |
| 0.02% | bub.bz |
| 0.02% | ning.it |
| 0.02% | mltp.ly |
| 0.02% | que.es |
| 0.02% | awe.sm |
| 0.02% | trim.li |
| 0.01% | flne.ws |
| 0.01% | vf.cx |
| 0.01% | 76k.com |
| 0.01% | askp.me |
| 0.01% | olha.biz |
| 0.01% | rp.pe |
| 0.01% | job.bs |
| 0.01% | znl.me |
| 0.01% | twa.lk |
| 0.01% | zz.gd |
| 0.01% | twib.es |
| 0.01% | rago.ca |
| 0.01% | sp2.ro |
| 0.01% | twlv.net |
| 0.01% | tynt.com |
| 0.01% | pk.gd |
| 0.01% | doms.bz |
| 0.01% | xr.com |
| 0.01% | hyux.com |
| 0.01% | bit2.ca |
| 0.01% | bz9.cc |
| 0.01% | tol.bz |
| 0.01% | act.ly |
| 0.01% | blip.tv |
| 0.01% | 9mp.com |
| 0.01% | dw.am |
| 0.01% | f1a.me |
| 0.01% | fwd4.me |
| 0.01% | amzn.com |
| 0.01% | bte.tc |
| 0.01% | gmed.net |
| 0.01% | r.im |
| 0.01% | sn.im |
| 0.01% | vai.la |
| 0.01% | boo.fm |
| 0.01% | elmo.st |
| 0.01% | im.ly |
(Disclaimer: some of those may not in fact be URLs Shorteners. The list was too long, and my life too short, to have the time to go through each of them and verify what their business is. If you find any error, please feel free to let me know.)
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