Ask HN: Bit.ly Now, what happened to you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Bit.ly Now, what happened to you?

2 pointsdolinsky2 comments

http://twitter.com/#!/clickabit

Bit.ly just got through raising $9M Series B funding, they're growing like crazy, and we've all heard about the amazing data (sic) that bit.ly is collecting. Is there more value to them selling this data to companies like NYT so they can all launch their own social news products vs opening up this firehose to the public? This is akin to Twitter only allowing a very select few have access to their firehose. It's not a far stretch to suggest that had Twitter done so their growth would have been stymied.

What I don't understand is how something as trivial as a URL shortener is in a position to:

  - attract funding at this level

  - ever monetize it (so you get some click stats on a subset of the web, so what?)

  - is able to convince investors they're getting a 'good deal' at any valuation

URl shorteners are like a plague, I will never ever use them for anything voluntarily (some sites will do it automatically, not much point in fighting windmills there), they degrade the value of the web (indirections make the graph of the web harder to interpret and add another step to linking that could fail) and in general are a nuisance because they make a link unreadable, you never know what you're going to get from that particular box of chocolates.

They also make it much easier to spread 'bait and switch' links where the link title says one thing but the content is something entirely different.

Down with URL shorteners.

I can upvote your comment only once, unfortunately.

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