GOOGLE / BIT.LY / THE BATTLE OF THE LINK SHORTENERS

 Driven by the uptake in real-time social media services, particularly on mobile, the use of page views via link-sharing services such as bit.ly and TinyURL has seen staggering growth this year. Mobile click throughs alone to shortened URLs have risen by 1068%, according to mobile internet company Novarra.

bit.ly in particular has soared since Twitter moved to it from TinyURL as its default link shortening service. Tweetmeme stats now show bit.ly accounting for 59.3% of shortened URLs flowing through Twitter, against TinyURL's 8.8%.

Now Google has entered the fray, announcing its new link shortener Goo.gl, available (for now) from the Google Toolbar and Feedburner, rather than for broader consumer use. This comes quick on the heels of Facebook's Fb.me, which is being used for URLs in its mobile interface. 

Meanwhile, bit.ly said that it will begin creating custom URLs for a number of websites and publishers including Microsoft's Bing, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The custom domains would identify the destination of the shortened links (e.g. nyti.ms) and come with a handy dashboard for monitoring real-time click throughs.