Bit.ly is healthy and growing, says John Borthwick of Betaworks, which created and then spun off the URL shortener, even despite the fact that it’s no longer the default shortener used by Twitter. The messaging service broke off its formerly close relationship with Bit.ly in December, and CEO Evan Williams told developers at the Chirp conference in San Francisco this week that it will be developing its own URL shortener. As Twitter has been moving in on features and services developed by outside companies — either by developing its own or by buying them, as it did with iPhone app Tweetie — concern has been growing about the fate of so-called “hole fillers” in the Twitter ecosystem, and Bit.ly’s name has routinely been mentioned as one of the doomed.
Borthwick, however, who co-founded Betaworks and has invested in and/or founded Twitter tools such as Summize (which was acquired by Twitter) and Tweetdeck, says in a blog post that Bit.ly “is growing and continues to scale” despite the fact that Twitter “pretty much stopped using bit.ly to shorten URLs on Twitter.com in December.” He says that Twitter.com now represents less than 1 percent of Bit.ly links that are shortened, compared with between 3 and 8 percent before the “transition” was made in December. Borthwick says that the relationship with Twitter worked well “during a period of hyper growth” but that both sides have effectively moved on. His blog post has the feel of someone writing a note to an ex-girlfriend after they have decided to break up and see other people:
We thank Twitter, everyone there, for the kick start it gave bit.ly. And we certainly hope we helped Twitter during a difficult scaling period.
Some have suggested that Bit.ly has been “screwed” by Twitter, but Borthwick describes this as “noise.” If the traffic numbers provided are accurate (and there’s no reason to believe they aren’t), it seems that Bit.ly has been able to leverage its close relationship with Twitter, and has sufficient scale and reach now that it’s no longer dependent on the social network for its business.
