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).  

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.

Top Domains Used on Twitter

Interesting post over on the Cligs blog, Analysis of Linking Patterns on Twitter. Cligs, an URL shortening service, performed some analysis on the top domains used on Twitter by analyzing over 10.2 million tweets that contained over 2 million links. They provide a breakdown of the Top 50 domains as well as the top URL shorteners used on Twitter.

You also might want to read the nice write up, The Only 3 URL Shortening Services You Should Consider Using, on WebChicklets.