Whatever people think about short url’s we think they are here to stay, not only are they handy for fitting into your tweets they are also an invaluable way to track users behavior throughout social media. Each short url can be tracked as it is passed about by users. Data can be built up on when and who clicked through and where they all came from, this in turn lets marketeers track the success or failure of their campaigns.
Shortening 101
We have been working for several months behind the scenes with a whole range of the short url services so that we could bring publishers a unique range of services built upon the most popular of these services. So far TweetMeme has either taken whatever short url it first spotted, and or we re-shortened via a shortlist of highly reliable + scalable services (e.g. bit.ly). You have all been vocalising your desire to customize this and we have been listening.
Included in the next release (happening this week) is the ability to choose which short url you want. For automated shortening we support 7 of the most popular shortening services and will be adding more over the coming weeks. On top of that we already support personalized shortening (where you supply an API key so that the tracking data is then individual to yourself) for 3 of those services. And again we will continue to work with our partners to add further support.
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And best of all, all of them work with our ‘One-Click’ retweet that lets users retweet without leaving the site the button is on.
As we announced last Friday we are also releasing the ability to place retweet buttons in RSS & Emails
If you run a shortening service or have one that your would like to see supported please get in touch or via @tweetmemedev.
This will be a nice update. What about custom short URLS, e.g. TechCrunch use tcrn.ch and there is a plugin for WordPress that allows people to make their own too. I for one would very much like to be able to use my own domain’s short URL. Sorry if you’re planning that and I’ve misunderstood
Thats great news, I can honestly say that before I was using Twitter, I couldn’t quite fathom the existence of these services!
At any rate, I would like to recommend the shortening service; http://jmp.li/ . It has some nice stats features, and a simple, low-overhead API. Moreover, this service is currently underused, meaning that typically, only two letters are required beyond the core URL; e.g.; ‘http://jmp.li/XX’.
Great work on the developments so far!
Gaby, yes you will be able to use custom URLS – two routes to this, the easiest is if you are use awe.sm then it will ‘just work’ – the second is for sites we dont yet support, but if you do the shortening yourself you can still set the alias directly.
You forgot to mention StumbleUpon’s entry into the market with su.pr. It’s a great addition because it allows one to post to Facebook and Twitter with a shortened URL and a message. I highly recommend it!
It would be really handy to integrate su.pr into Tweetmeme. I’ll make sure and suggest it via your contact form…
[...] also previewed last week that we were adding support for choosing your own short url service. This has also now [...]