As you might guess, URL shorteners take long, hierarchical or nonsensical URL strings and crunch them down in to a more manageable size. This involves two steps: creating a short unique replacement URL, then redirecting to the original URL. The reasons for doing this include hiding the original URL, making long URLs easier to copy and paste or saving space in text-limited applications, like Twitter. The last thing you want to do is waste a bunch space with huge URLs if you only have 140 characters of real estate to work with. If your goal is to get people to click a link, you can really use those extra characters to enhance your argument for doing so or adding more hash tags to help searchers find your content. For example, which of these calls-to-action are you most likely to execute:

dj_c_check I blogged about a thing: http://www.manningproductions.com/blog/2010/02/html5-vs-adobe-this-sunday-in-5-d-space/ (113 characters)

OR:

the99percent Cognitive science behind why you should keep that brand name, sales pitch, explanation, etc SIMPLE: http://cot.ag/c6vkT1 (121 characters)

I am not trying to throw Curtis under the bus, just illustrate a point. Many large internet brands are developing or have already rolled out their own shortening systems: amzn.com, flic.kr, goo.gl, youtu.be, fb.me and gop.am (LOL and LOL2). Could you guess what any of those major online organizations were? Most of these systems take things a bit further. Bit.ly, a popular free URL shortener allows you to pick your own key for the URL you are shortening and provide analytic data, while Flikr, YouTube and Amazon use the unique keys that each piece of content already has as the shortened key.

By creating their own branded URL shortening systems, these organizations have protected or enhanced their brands in an number of ways:

1. The brand is transmitted along with the link when used by the general public, increasing exposure
2. These short, branded URLs are easier for mobile and social media users to spread, which may be the goal of the content and online strategy in the first place
3. Many people may be wary of unfamiliar domains and strange URLs that look like http://bit.ly/byQp52 or http://tinyurl.com/yjz5gka that the free services provide

While I may have imagined the NASA version of a branded URL shortener, I did discover go.usa.gov, which “lets government employees create short .gov URLs from official government domains, such as .gov, .mil, .si.edu, or .fed.us URLs.” NASA’s twitter authors have taken advantage of this beta program to help legitimize the links they post. If even the United States Government’s web strategy is more advanced than yours, perhaps it is time for you to rethink how you manage your brand online.

UPDATE: Found these brands with custom shortening systems this morning: arst.ch and nyti.ms. Cleverly, these online publications use this systems for their sharing tools, so when you use the “send to <social application>” button you spread the branded short URL.

UPDATE II: This article discusses using the Twitter and bit.ly APIs to customize how your site’s sharing functions work.

UPDATE III: Somewhere along the way Twitter rolled out the Favorites function for archiving specific posts for reference. I am now using that feature for saving tweets that like the mythical one that spurred this post.