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What’s Your URL Shortener of Choice?

Posted by John Saddington on Apr 2, 2009

bitly_logoThey’ve been around for a while and you probably use them every single day: The URL-Shortener. Services like TinyURL, Is.gd, and Bit.ly.

It’s been interesting to see new ones come out nearly every week and yet they all do the exactly the same thing… or do they?

picture-3The one reason I’m starting to really like Bit.ly is after Tony Steward showed me something that LifeChurch.tv is doing through their online endeavors: Tracking click-thru’s via their Twitter and other social networking outlets. You can actually do it in real-time.

That’s pretty neat.

I also like how you can establish a consistent account and even use Twitter (multiple accounts too) to publish your tweets and then pull metrics on how many times it’s clicked, etc.

One article from GigaOM suggests that Bit.ly could even upstage Digg, given that that it’s received a substantial round of VC funding, it can track clicks (like votes), the sources are from anywhere (source-page agnostic), and it’s extremely well trafficked already.

I would probably agree. Bit.ly, as a service (and eventual platform) is something to keep your eyes on.

But, there’s certainly a number of them to choose from.

Which one do you use the most and why?

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John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchCrunch.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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27 Responses to “What’s Your URL Shortener of Choice?”

  1. Phillip Gibb
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 10:54 am

    tinyurl but only because it is the default option on destroy twitter

    Reply
  2. Adam_S
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:38 am

    I don't really have a consistent one. I have used most of them. Bit.ly was the first on tweatdeck. I changed to is.gd because it was a character shorter. I may change back.

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:48 am

      we are so stingy… 1 char!

      ;)

      Reply
  3. Ancoti
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 11:55 am

    I guess I have been using Is.gd. It is hat I installed first, no other reason i can think of.

    Reply
  4. Henry Zonio
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 12:48 pm

    I use twurl because you can track that one, too… but it sounds like bit.ly is more versatile… i'll have to give it a try for a while

    Reply
  5. Steven Rossi
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 12:59 pm

    I use bit.ly, mostly because I like the tracking and it's fairly easy to use. I'm still partial to Tinyurl, though, since it was the original. If it offered comparable services to bit.ly, I'd consider switching back.

    Reply
  6. Aaron
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 1:16 pm

    bit.ly all the way. A shame its not integrated into more apps, add-ons, etc.

    Reply
  7. Brad Zimmerman
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    Digg is making a url shortener that will upstage bit.ly , you can actually shorten via the address bar in any browser. Kevin Rose talked about it on as recent TWiT.

    Reply
  8. human3rror
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 1:30 pm

    Yeah, but digg… comon… i'm a bit tired of them.

    ;)

    Reply
  9. human3rror
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    yeah. i still use tiny just because… my new theme will be sporting it.

    Reply
  10. John
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    I use Cli.gs – http://cli.gs. It seems to give the most analytics about links, including when bots hit it, when people RT it, when it shows up on blogs, friendfeed, and other social sites, and even gives you the option to create to separate links to the same destination so you can track campaigns separately. I highly recommend it.

    Reply
  11. jaycaruso
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    I use bit.ly as it seems to be the one with no errors. Sometimes tinyurl and even is.gd once in awhile produces 404 errors. Haven't had that happen yet with bit.ly

    Reply
  12. Kevin_Martineau
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 4:59 pm

    I have only used tinyurl because I did not realize there were other options out there . . . I will have to check out bit.ly :)

    Reply
  13. Brad Zimmerman
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 7:17 pm

    the digg shortener has just been posted check it here: http://digg.com/d1nnVZ

    Reply
  14. KevinRossen
    Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 7:44 pm

    I like http://tr.im
    It allows you to track click-thrus and use twitter credentials to login as well. Plus it sounds cooler to me: "trim" and you gain back one character, which can make a difference when posting to twitter.

    Another option that I think is good for churches is Google Short Links. It's available to Google Apps users. What's cool about it is that you can have your own branded short links (such as link.churchcrunch.com/WHATEVER), which would probably be more likely to be clicked by less tech-savvy church-goers. Check it out: http://tr.im/GooSL

    Reply
  15. Jim
    Friday, April 3, 2009 at 6:06 am

    uh…hmmm…lemmee see…originally i was using tinyurl, but now i use whatever tweetdeck does to shorten and i like to use ping.fm

    Reply
  16. Graham Brenna
    Friday, April 3, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    haha… That's honestly the same reason I went to is.gd too! I haven't really researched them at all. Twitter Tools uses TinyURL so that's what happens when I post a blog… (sometimes… I don't know why it hasn't worked the last couple of times) but for linking thru TweetDeck I typically use is.gd cuz of the one character shorter deal.

    I'll have to look into bit.ly for the reason you mentioned here! Def. interesting

    (And this is def. not a human3rror esque one word answer! haha)

    Reply
  17. tommy
    Friday, April 3, 2009 at 8:51 pm

    cli.gs for me

    Reply
  18. human3rror
    Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 7:00 pm

    word.

    …

    UP!

    2 words.

    Reply
  19. human3rror
    Sunday, April 5, 2009 at 7:03 pm

    thanks kevin, this looks cool.

    Reply
  20. dsingletary911
    Monday, April 6, 2009 at 10:41 pm

    I really like how you can track usage stats with bit.ly

    Reply
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