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Branded short URLs in the wild and on TweetDeck

By
Friday, 29 January 2010

Just noticed something cool and wanted to share. If you’re using bit.ly to shorten URLs and add a Techcrunch (techcrunch.com) or Onion (theonion.com) URL to the compose window in TweetDeck, instead of shortening to a bit.ly link you’ll get an appropriately branded short URL i.e. tcrn.ch or onion.com.

I’ve subsequently learnt (from the bit.ly guys) this is part of a new bit.ly PRO service and these branded URLs will soon be opened up to all bit.ly PRO enterprise users. From a user point of view short URLs with a greater sense of transparency can’t be bad and as a publisher getting potentially thousands of additional brand mentions in the stream wouldn’t hurt either.

So if you notice URLs shortening to something other than bit.ly in your TweetDeck, don’t panic - this is expected and potentially rather interesting. Might be worth registering that short URL for your brand sooner rather than later. Could someone build a short URL generator?

UPDATE: use http://domai.nr for a short domain generator (thanks yahelc)