The .LY in Link Shrinking (A Closer Look at Bit.ly and Ow.ly)

Hundreds of link shortening services are available today, but I believe some research and consideration is a must before embracing two of the more popular services. Let me explain. Bit.ly and ow.ly are two link shrinking services that are trending toward greater acceptance. A NY Times article from this summer estimated that bit.ly accounted for 46 percent of all links shortened

Bit.ly’s recent success is a derivative of Twitter’s integration with bit.ly as their default link shortening service. Unlike the hundreds of other services, bit.ly has focused on reliability and basic analytics. Tinyurl, the original link shrinker, never embraced value-added services and had some issues with reliability, which most likely explains why Twitter shifted from Tinyurl to bit.ly. Also, bit.ly has attracted several well-recognized investors to solidify their dominance in the link shrinking space.

So what’s the concern with bit.ly or ow.ly? Well the concern has very little to do with features, management, business plans or competition. In fact it is as simple as politics. To clarify, it’s the politics of one country, Libya. Bit.ly and ow.ly built their companies around a top-level domain (TLD) controlled by Libya thus the .ly in their names.

I’m not even a novice on international politics, but the encyclopedia Britannica defines the Libyan form of government as authoritarian. Wikipedia uses the term dictatorship to describe the country’s government. In a recent NPR interview, Libya was portrayed as a country that is making positive changes with the international community, but that the country’s leadership is unpredictable. More positively, in January of this year after three decades, the US Government re-established an official US Embassy in Libya.

To summarize, bit.ly and ow.ly to a lesser extent are becoming pervasive throughout social media. Bit.ly in particular seems to be a solid link shrinker with value added solutions. However, both bit.ly and ow.ly, no matter how solid their business plans, operate at the benevolence of a foreign government that controls their top-level domain name – .ly. While the Libyan government has recently improved it’s international standing, like any autonomous state, they could modify their license of the .ly domain and potentially re-direct an enormous amount of Internet traffic.

I’m not an alarmist, but it seems prudent to seed indexed content in the most reliable manner. This means taking the time to reduce force majeure variables especially if an alternative option exists or could be easily created as is the cases for link shrinking.

Image Source: http://static.betaworks.com/corpsite/images/small_bitly_puffer.png