Analysis - by Patrick Thornton on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:19 - View Comments

Bit.ly and Ow.ly best URL shorteners

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Not all URL shorteners are created equal, especially if you’re shortening URLs for work.

What good is it to shorten a link if it doesn’t work for end users? That will deprive you of page views and frustrate users (potentially losing customers). Speed and reliability matter.

Twitter and social media users know how important URL shorteners have become. Without URL shortening, Twitter and other microblogging services would be much less functional. Many journalists and news organizations are sharing links via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. For these people and companies, URL shortening reliability is very important.

Royal Pingdom did a great study comparing the speed and reliability of URL shorntening services. Key findings:

  • Ow.ly had 0 downtime between July 16 and August 16 of 2009. That’s amazing. Bit.ly was close with 99.98 percent uptime. Tr.im came in last with a 99.10 percent uptime, which translates into almost 80 hours of downtime a year.
  • Is.gd is the fastest URL shortening service, followed by Bit.ly and Ow.ly. Snipurl was the slowest.
  • “Five out of nine services had a 99.9% uptime or better, which we have to consider acceptable.” There is a big difference in 99 and 99.9 percent uptime, especially when you’re trying to share links at peak times of day.
  • When speed and reliability are combined, Bit.ly and Ow.ly tied for first. Tr.im came in last.

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  • http://engineroomblog.blogspot.com JD (The Engine Room)

    What about other features, such as the ability to track the popularity of your shortened links (which I know bit.ly, for one, offers)? For me, this is more important than whether uptime is 99% or 99.9%.

  • Alterego

    Any speed and reliability benefits associated with Ow.ly are completely drowned out by that stupid bar they put across the top of each page they link to.

  • http://cru.ms Bill B

    I think http://cru.ms is going to take those mothuhs down ;)

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BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

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