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.
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
