(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web hosting provider Brinkster (www.brinkster.com) announced this week that it has launched a new URL shortening service it is calling br.st! (www.br.st), throwing its hat into an already quite well-served market associated with several of the most popular social networking services.
URL shortening services offer users a way of including long web links in posts on services like Twitter and Facebook (and those two in particular). There are more than a dozen services in the highly competitive market, including market leader Bit.ly and well-known TinyURL.com.
The services first gained popularity with newsgroup and web forum users, but have seen an explosion in popularity as a result of the extreme popularity of Twitter (of the 20 posts currently on my Twitter feed, 12 of them include a url shortened using one of these services).
Brinkster says br.st’s angle in the URL shortening game will be the analytics it provides. Many of the tools currently in the market offer users tracking on the number and source of the clicks on their shortened URLs. According to Brinkster, br.st intends to do it better.
The company says br.st displays stats in the user’s own time zone automatically, and can compare three metrics (total, country, region/state) graphically. Along with statistics, br.st will provide some advanced malware scanning – url hijacking or misdirection being one danger of clicking on a shortened url.
“br.st scans for malware three different times during the use of a br.st link,” says the press release. “Each scan is done against the Google Safe Browsing list that is updated every 30 minutes. Links are scanned when they are first submitted to be shortened, when a preview link is accessed, and when a short link is clicked on.”
Users can also add a hypen to the end of any link to view a preview page.
Links shortened using br.st can be included with a short post and sent to more than 10 social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook. The company also plans to introduce integration with Google analytics and image and file sharing in the coming months.
Nevertheless, it’s a difficult market to get into, particularly since Bit.ly has the nod as Twitter’s default URL shortening service. When Canadian URL shortener tr.im threw in the towel in August, the company wrote in its blog that, “Twitter has stacked the URL shortening business opportunity overwhelmingly in bit.ly’s favour, as twitter.com currently operates. This is not whining, as some have suggested, but a simple reality.”
Furthermore, there is no real consensus (or even a really established idea) on a business model for a URL shortening service. In that same blog post, tr.im mentioned “framing” URLs or interstitial advertisements as possible (though undesirable) sources of revenue.
Brinkster didn’t include any information about an intended business model, or any possible synergies between a URL shortening service and a hosting business in the br.st announcement.
