Attentionization

While all the webs been a-twitter on status updating services like Twitter and Friendfeed, there’s been less mainstream discussion about some of the elements that make these status updates possible and manageable for all of us.  Link Shorteners are the unsung hard workers of the update world and it’s about time they got their due.

Link Shortening utilities (what i refer to as ‘SHURLS’) are one of the key developments that has made twitter and facebook updates readable and usable for many of us.  In short, link shorteners like bit.ly and TinyURL have created a link economy that has yet to been tamed and monetized.  It won’t be long, however, before this gets more attention from entrepreneurs, publishers, and users alike.  So what are link shorteners and why are they valuable?

What a link shortener does is take that obnoxiously long link and compresses it to many fewer characters.  For example look at this link:     http://www.friedbeef.com/top-5-url-shorteners-and-how-they-help-you/ – it’s 68 characters long.  That is not actually a very long link, as links go, but if you were to add this to Facebook, it would take up the whole status window.

The solution for making this link something that you would want to include in a status update is to shorten it.  Services like TinyURL help you accomplish this.  Using TinyURL, i was able to take that 68 character link and reduce it to a more manageable 25 characters (http://tinyurl.com/656y3o).

Link shorteners have many useful applications besides merely shortening long links.  For starts, they obsure the site that the click will visit.  That’s good and bad depending on what you’re trying to achieve.  If you’re posting a link on Twitter, and you want to maximize the ‘mystery’ element of your link (click here for a surprise!), then then inscrutability of the link’s destination is part of the fun.  Likewise if you are an internet affiliate marketer, you may want to obscure the link so that your referrer code and all of the other stuff in the link is hidden.

There are negatives to shortened URLs.  For one, ‘Shurls’ are a great way to drive you to a ‘forbidden’ site that you would not visit if you knew where you were headed.  ‘Shurly’ this is not the case with most shortened URLs, but it’s happening.  Another negative is that these links often replace tracked links produced by the original publisher.  For example, if an email marketer sent out an offer with a ‘legit’ link, that link is probably being tracked in a third party application like Direct Track.  If someone hijacks the offer and sends it out as if it were their own, and replaces the original tracking link with one of their own creation, the original owner of the creative and offer ‘may’ be cheated out of their conversion commission.

Some don’t see any value to link shorteners.  In his recent article in Slate, Farhad Manjoo joins the chorus of SHURL skeptics.  Farhad, shortened links aren’t just for status updates anymore.

It seems to me that there is one good application for SHURLS that isn’t close to status update is in traditional publishing.  Today, in the paper versions of magazines and newspapers there is an opportunity to get wider distribution of these articles online.  All publishers would need to do is to take the article’s online URL and run it through a shortener and then take the shortened link and put it at the top and/or bottom of the article.  Doing this would accomplish several important things.

First, someone who was reading an article but wanted to share it could do so easily using a SHURL.  SHURLS are so short that they are easily copied and pasted by hand.  Second, the publisher could easily track how many folks were reading offline but referring online.  This is valuable information.  Third, there would be more traffic to the online site.

For users unable to finish, or wanting to archive and interesting article, doing something like this would be very helpful.

Advertisers could do the same thing:  Take their paper ads and use SHURLs in them.  For the folks who want to call by phone, fine, there’s a way to track that too.  But why not use a specific SHURL for every ad in every different publication – including yellow pages – and then track which are most effective?  The inobtrusive links are free to generate and easy to track.

Just sayin!