Borthwick: Twitter, Thanks For The Ride

On Wednesday at Twitter's Chirp conference, CEO Evan Williams released another bomb during the wrap-up Q&A session: Twitter is working on creating it's own link shortener for Twitter.com. Once again, in the space of a week, Twitter declared it was moving into an area previously occupied by another company in the Twitter eco-system, in this case bit.ly, which grew on the back of Twitter when it became the default link shortener on the service in May, 2009. I was able to speak with bit.ly and betaworks CEO John Borthwick yesterday about Twitter’s unwinding of their relationship. The impact on bit.ly may be negligible, at least in the short run. It turns out that Twitter stopped using bit.ly as it’s default shortener on Twitter.com back in early December, except for one specific use-case. And even before then, Twitter.com accounted for only about 5 percent of link encodes. Now it is less than 1 percent. Yet bit.ly encoded 3.4 billion links last month and continues to have record days. That is because it is used by many Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck (a betaworks portfolio company).