For Twitter users fighting the 140-character limit, URL shorteners were the perfect answer. Instead of a long URL like http://www.problognews.com/google-kill-rss, you could shorten it to http://bit.ly/DKRwM. Now Twitter’s default URL shortener has cloned itself and dropped two characters. Now bit.ly users need only type j.mp.
This is a smart move. “They’ve now eliminated one of potential competitors advantages by offering as short a URL as possible,” write Adam Ostrow of Mashable.
That competition could come from other companies, including Google, looking to put their own brand on the burgeoning market for URL shortening services. In August, Automattic unveiled wp.me, a URL shortener for users of the WordPress.com blog service, for example.
Bit.ly, which has raised $2 million in funding, recently told the New York Times it’s links are clicked on at least 50 million times each week.
