UPDATED 09:14 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2011

Bit.ly’s Chief Data Scientist Downplays Twitter Changes

Hilary Mason, the chief data scientist at Bit.ly, responded to a tweeted update sent out by Twitter today that reads “We’re about to start wrapping all URLs regardless of their length with the t.co URL wrapper.” Twitter users  account for a huge portion of the visits link shorteners such as Bit.ly get every month, and a more convenient service built into the social network itself can result in a wide-scale switch.

Twitter has been offering the service since August 24th, and Mason believes the upcoming update, just like the original launch, won’t have that big of an impact on her company.

“The only change is that they will now wrap links under twenty characters, which means that there will actually be tweets longer than 140 characters,” she wrote, adding, “It hasn’t had much of an effect on bitly. We provide public analytics that people love!”

Bit.ly may not have been affected, but its competitors have.  Tom Critchlow, VP of Operations at Distilled NYC said he has seen a decrease in visitors since August. He also mentioned that while Bitly won’t see a lot of people abandoning it in favor of Twitter’s offering, its analytics business may face some competition.  Critchlow thinks Twitter is “definitely planning on rolling out more robust analytics,” a forecast that is not so farfetched considering the social network has been exploring new ways of monetizing its data for quite some time now.

Mason recently expanded on analytics, and how Bitly is leveraging data in an interview with John Furrier of SiliconAngle and Dave Vellante of Wikibon on theCube.

Twitter is working on boosting its analytics portfolio. The latest launch was in September when it introduced Storm, an open-source data processing engine initiative that was originally created by BlackType which it acquired.


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