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Paid URL Shortening. Seriously?

Originally published by "dbarker" on 2009-12-15 10:38:00Z

Announcing bit.ly Pro : I don’t know if I’m in the minority here, but this is getting out of hand.

Today we’re pleased to announce a new service: bit.ly Pro. The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites.

This entire market is being driven by Twitter, basically.  And if Twitter ever expands its character limit or gets into the URL shortening business themselves, these folks have a business problem.

This strikes me as the very definition of what Tim Bray called “development sharecropping.”

If I’m wrong, someone please point this out in the comments and explain why.

Comment by "Joseph Scott" on 2009-12-16 18:18:00Z
Twitter is essentially already in the URL shortening business by using bit.ly by default to shorten URLs. Twitter and bit.ly have some common investors: [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter) [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/bit-ly](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/bit-ly)
Comment by "Thud" on 2009-12-16 17:28:00Z
It's possible they're using the "let's make some money before the idiots wise up" business model, which means they don't need to structure their business for the ages. Morally questionable, I suppose, but a thing you can do.