Twitter Image URL Shortner Not So Short

I got a glimpse of Twitter's new native URL shortener for images. In a recent tweet by @dannysullivan he referenced an image of the home page for Bing with a Panda on it. As you can see from the below screenshot the image URL is pic.twitter.com/HowIUza (Not sure if this is truly the best shortened domain name for images shared on Twitter.) The image URL shortening service has not been released to the general masses as it is still in beta. 

Pic.Twitter.com - Twitter Image URL Shortener

This seems to be bad news for twitpic (which some believe would be acquired by Twitter) and yfrog. But this just seems to be the next logical step in the Twitter evolution to harness the sharing/click data for their analytics dashboard (see Twitter Moves One Step Closer to Business Accounts).  

Twitter Quietly Rolls Out Own URL Shortner

Twitter recently posted, Trust and Safety, a blog entry that discussed the steps they are taken to prevent scams and malicious links on Twitter. This was in response to the recent Barracuda Labs report that showed in October 2009, one in eight accounts created were deemed to be malicious, suspicious, or otherwise misused. But at the end of the Twitter post there is mention that they are going to be redirecting links within Direct Messages and email notifications. It looks like they will be using the URL shortener twt.tl to do this. It seems to be open ended as whether they plan to roll this shortening service out to status updates.

Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land, put the Twitter URL shortener to the test to see if the tracking of the originial shorten URL would be lost. He found that there indeed seems to be NO impact.

Goo.gl - Google URL Shortner

Google announced their new URL shortening service, goo.gl. This URL shortening service is available within the Google toolbar and within Feedburner. You will need to download the latest Google toolbar to get the Share feature. Currently the goo.gl URL shortener is not a standalone service from Google. So you can't use it to shorten URLs without going through the Google toolbar or through Feedburner.

A new feature for Feedburner is to use the new goo.gl URL shortening service to automatically post your latest blog entries to your Twitter account. This feature acts similarly to TwitterFeed, but is much more reliable. ProBlogger has a nice overview of this new Feedburner feature.

There has been speculation on how this will affect the most popular URL shortener, bit.ly. Some think that Google will release this as a standalone service (and they sort of mentioned it in the original blog post that this could happen) with enhanced tracking features. I for one would like to see a seamless integration with Google Analytics.

Now let me put on the tin foil hat. I think Google may struggle a bit with this service. Google is trying to capture user data from too many points and many people may feel that Google is the next Minoirty Report. I for one will not be jumping ship from bit.ly to goo.gl for my URL shortening services.

Brand Your Tweets - What Every Brand Manager Needs To Do

One of the first steps to brand your Tweets is to use a custom URL shortener. Coke is a great example of how they created their own branded URL shortner, http://cokeurl.com/. This reinforces their brand, gives credibility to the shorten URL, and ensures that they have no broken links if a URL shortening service goes belly up (read about tr.im). There are several resources to find a URL shortening script, but make sure you read Danny Sullivan's article, URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?, to understand what you should look for in a URL shortening service.

When you post from an application like CoTweet, TweetDeck, or Twitterfon, the tweet posts a statement containing the date of publication of the tweet and at what source you have posted the message from. So in the above Coke example you will see that they posted this tweet from CoTweet. The actual text "CoTweet" links back to the CoTweet.com site. So why not do what all of these other applications do and create the tweet from your own domain?

If Coke was forward thinking they would have created a Twitter application on their own domain and thus have the capability to brand this "from" link. This would totally brand the entire tweet. Why allow these third party apps to get all the glory?

Now your are asking do I need to put in the time and resources to create my own Twitter application? Well not exactly. A French programmer developed a PHP script to allow you to set up a brandable Twitter "from" link. The translated article can be found here. Now the script requires PHP5 and an Twitter oAuth account. This script was originally designed to exploit the fact that these "from" links were DoFollow links. Not sure if this script was the reason why Twitter recently closed that loop hole and started to noFollow these "from" links (first reported here).

I recently tested this script and here is a screenshot of my Tweet.