
That's Only Ten Lines Of Code - ph0rque
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/03/thats-only-ten-lines-of-code.html
======
patio11
It is absolutely true that size of the codebase is not a consideration to
business success. Mine would fit comfortably in the average CS101 lab project
-- who cares.

The reason why bit.ly's triviality is a reason to worry about its future is
not that it is short. It is that there is no defensible competitive moat --
they're primarily parasiting their users off another popular service (Twitter)
who could obliterate them _as a side effect_ of an engineering change which
would be mostly _unremarkable_. (e.g. "Our front-end now auto-crunches URLs to
internal twitter ones, complete with analytics.")

There is also no compelling reason for people to pay for their service or
their data -- the notion that the second has any value at all appears to
primarily be bubble thinking utterly disconnected to any actual experience of
selling data. (A few hundred people -- can't quite tell you who, but they're
out there -- like computerized voices which sound like Hannah Montana, as
demonstrated by the response to this tweet. Shazam! Pay me money.)

~~~
aditya
_they're primarily parasiting their users off another popular service
(Twitter)_

source? not sure that's totally true. (maybe for tinyurl, which twitter uses
automatically, but bit.ly?)

~~~
patio11
Here's a list of their most popular links.

<http://twitter.com/bitlynow>

Copy/paste each link into their search page, then click "info", and you'll see
where the users are clicking them.

~~~
aditya
No - I'm just going to take your word for it :) Thanks!

Edit: oh wait. In the top 10:

 _Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct

Direct Traffic includes people clicking a bit.ly link from:

\- Desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook or Apple mail

\- AIR applications like Tweetdeck or Twirhl

\- Mobile apps like Twitterific or Blackberry Mail

\- Chat apps like AIM

\- SMS/MMS messages

It also includes people who typed a bit.ly link directly into their browser_

seems to be 10x of twitter.com, so it's not easy to say that most of that is
API traffic from Twitter clients, then.

So, then, no substantial evidence. I'm just curious whether it is a good
assumption that twitter provides most of the traffic for all URL shortners, or
not. Perhaps the people that run URL shortners can comment?

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tlrobinson
The difference between Twitter and bit.ly is that Twitter users greatly
benefit from the network effects of having all the people they care about on
Twitter.

With bit.ly it doesn't matter _at all_ if I use the same URL shortening
service they use or not. The second something better comes along, or Twitter
decides to switch to something else, or they attempt to monetize it by
inserting ads or something there will be a mass exodus.

Of course there's always the possibility that the bit.ly folks pitched some
grand vision we don't know about to their investors.

On a related note, I have a feeling our reliance on URL shortening services is
going to bite us in the ass in the future. When one of these service goes out
of business you're left with thousands or millions of essentially dangling
pointers. It also throws a monkey wrench into PageRank type algorithms.

~~~
c3o
@PageRank: Doesn't Google already follow redirects? (Most of) those URL
shorteners aren't doing anything else.

------
cperciva
More to the point: Technical sophistication is one way of keeping ahead of the
competition, and probably the most appealing to hackers; but it's not the only
one. You can be very successful selling complete garbage; just look at
Microsoft.

Edit: Yes, I'm being facetious in poking fun at Microsoft.

~~~
mahmud
That Microsoft comment is both trite and undeserved. Microsoft doesn't
particularly sell "garbage"; no, it undercuts application vendors for its
platform, copies their products, delivers a freebie/cheap knockoff to the
market to compete with them and drive them out, but works very hard to improve
it as time goes.

Microsoft is evil but it's not incompetent. Sometimes it even puts its market
dominance to good use; MS whipped hardware vendors into shape and gave us a
truly uniform PC platform with Plug and Play.

~~~
likpok
Also, many Microsoft products are actually quality products. The few bad
apples give the rest a bad name (also, some of the 3rd party apps give Windows
in general a bad name).

~~~
twopoint718
Agreed. The UI for the desktop just gives me a headache but there are some
really cool projects coming out of Redmond. There is some really interesting
work in computational photography:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/cambridge/projects/au...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/cambridge/projects/autocollage/)

<http://livelabs.com/photosynth/>

------
nir
The twitter comparison isn't really accurate - if you & the people you follow
are on twitter, it's not trivial to just switch to identi.ca. Switching from
tinyurl to is.gd to bit.ly to whatever comes next is a lot simpler.

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TweedHeads
.LY is for Lybia, what if the nutjob that rules the country decides to shut
down their internets?

A billion links linking to nowhere...

~~~
gojomo
Not long ago, Libya was on US trade-restricted lists.

If Libya were to return to such lists, would using a bit.ly URL to link to
advanced encryption code be a federal offense?

