The folks over at Kaspersky Labs decided to do some research on twitter and harvest short URL’s for 24 hours to see just which URL shortening service people commonly use. For those of you unfamiliar with URL shortening it is taking a big website address like:
http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=e260f558-3cbd-45db-a7d0-ffdffd3460c4
and making it something like:
What good is this? Well, when a tweet has to be a certain number of characters, every byte counts. Also, it’s a heck of a lot easier to remember shorter URL’s than longer ones….So, without further adieu, here’s the results
Looks like bit.ly is the king with just shy of 54% of the URL’s out there. The next big dog with just over 25% of the user base is tinyurl.com and there are of course others…
Something of interest in the statistics though, the fact that 1 in every 2 URL’s is bit.ly. What if someone were to try and take that service down or DDoS it? Essentially 1/2 of twitter’s URL’s are compromised…Food for thought.
