Tweet This URL

The Guardian, one of the principle publications in the UK, published a brief but interesting article on Twitter, inspired by the author’s attending a talk given by Even Weaver, one of the micro-publishing site’s lead engineers. Looking over some of the slides from the talk, it is clear that despite its early tendency to continually fail, Twitter has some sharp technologists on staff. Not mentioned in the slides but apparently during the talk, comes a surprising traffic figure. So often the attention focuses on how many users the company has and the volume of messages, which seems low at hundreds per second. Related to user stats, talk also tends to focus on the activity curve, namely the relatively low return rate of the average user and the lopsided nature of the messages with a small percentage contributing the bulk of messages. Not as much has been made of how the site gets its activity, and if the Guardian article is correct, only 20% of Twitter’s total traffic comes from visitors to twitter.com. Hubspot performed an analysis of roughly 500,000 tweets and found a slightly higher percentage, just shy of 50%, of the traffic came via direct usage of the site. Either way, that an incredibly popular company, one of the fastest growing, most lauded, receives certainly less than half of its use from its site seems almost counter intuitive. But, therein lies the brilliance of Twitter and what makes it a new paradigm for not just how people share and receive information but for entrepreneurship as well.

Unlike Google, which thanks to its volume and complexity has spawned countless specialists, like SEM and SEO firms, Twitter itself couldn’t present itself as any less complex. Users get 140 characters with which to compose a message, and only a handful of additional options exist, namely the less intuitive ones for newer users such as replies and direct messages. Twitter often receives credit for the @ nomenclature, e.g. @username, but they just instituted a convention frequently used in blog/website comments. If anything, the replies combined with the @ nomenclature can make for a cluttered experience when reading a friends’ feed, as many will contain parts of an ongoing conversation between them and others that are shared publicly. Then you have the convention of a retweet, where people will post to their followers something said by another used, beginning with "RT." For someone hoping to gain more exposure, getting retweets is wonderful because it means that your message was now seen by another group of people. Again, though, there is so much that Twitter doesn’t do, but can do, that it has created an entire ecosystem of start-ups who without Twitter would have no reason to exist. Yet, thanks to Twitter’s bare bones approach, while they rely on Twitter, they in many ways are better to use than Twitter itself. And, I think that is one of the reasons why so much Twitter volume doesn’t go through Twitter itself.

One of the more interesting companies to have risen to prominence from Twitter also has a most simplistic function at heart – URL shortening. I remember receiving an email years and years ago with a shortened URL, and I didn’t really understand the point. If you click on the link, you still get to where you need, and most people will at worst copy/paste instead of typing in the URL. That’s because I almost always had smarter email clients. Many people (circa 1996 – 2002) received only plain text and links would break if they wrapped from one line to the next, so it made sense to shorten them. Today, URL shortening is nothing more than a redirect, and those in the performance marketing space have long used (shorter) redirects. Most companies have vanity redirect URLs that look more appealing when seen rather than using a lengthier and more revealing corporate name. With the space constraints in Twitter, all of a sudden, shorter URLs take on a more vital importance. They become a necessary evil in fact as lengthier URLs help with natural search but eat away precious room from the actual body of the message. The leader in the shortening space was also the pioneer – www.tinyurl.com – who, according to their site, had shortened more than 275 million resulting in their seeing 2 billion hits per month. They were the natural choice for those using Twitter and should have created an indefensible business, but that wasn’t the case.

While TinyURL handled the vast majority of Twitter links, another company has done what would have seemed impossible, eclipse them. Bit.ly, did just that, and it happened for reasons that could easily alter the way you think about Twitter and webservices. The value of a URL shortening service is partly the length of the name. Bit.ly wins there – five characters versus ten, but shortening is a commodity, anyone can do it, and more than 100 different services exist. What makes bit.ly special is they realized what tinyurl didn’t (or didn’t’ act on fast enough), that the real value is the data, the insight from seeing all the shared links. Bit.ly takes a necessary evil (and one that slows down the internet) and turns it into something social. Create a shortened URL, and once you do, they offer all sort of interesting tracking. You can view detailed stats on the number of clicks your URL received, along with what social media references use it, and if you happened to pick a link already shortened, you will see how much traffic the overall link receives and your contribution to that total. Spend some time comparing it to tinyurl, and it becomes clear why they win. Spend some time playing with it regardless, because they have created a great user-interface and user-flow. Our space, the equivalent might be Tracking202, and it makes perfect sense why they have become so dominant. They offer a necessary function for free, but Tracking202 also wins with the visibility received. We have become very bullish on these opportunities and expect to see many more just in the performance marketing space alone. As for bit.ly, if Quantcast can try to raise $50 million off of a $300 million pre-money valuation, then the $2 million invested into bit.ly will become one hell of a return for their VC’s.