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Comment by wave | Hacker News Reader

I run un-shortening service called http://unshort.me which is getting about 200K API requests/day.

  Sample of 1,000,000 requests from the service:

  bit.ly       612,170
  tinyurl.com   55,091
  goo.gl        41,812
  ow.ly         35,531
  is.gd         29,533 
  t.co          26,043
  j.mp          21,172
  other        178,648

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The service in there that surprised me was Google's. While the chrome shortener extension has been out for a while it wasn't officially announced until last week.

Given that the big value add (beyond white labeling) that is being provided by these services is analytics tracking I'd be deeply concerned about a new URL shortener run by the same company with the dominant web analytics package.

It's only a matter of time until goo.gl stats are displayed within Google analytics and when that hits I wonder how many will stay with the current shortener services.

From the horse's mouth--do you see an organic access pattern in the resolved URLs, as a shadow of the popularity? Or are most of the 200K API requests batch processes?

What shortener would you suggest others use?

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