Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced at Chirp that Twitter will be using its own URL shortener rather than using bit.ly or TinyURL. Evan said that it would be “stupid” not to add native link-shortening capabilities into Twitter, since most Twitter clients already have that feature.
“We want to solve that problem,” he said. “Everyone else has solved that problem. We are probably not going to give people a choice. If they want to use a different shortener, they can use a different app.”
Twitter currently uses bit.ly as the default URL shortener but according to TechCrunch, Twitter already owns its own short URL, twt.tl, which it uses as an anti-spam mechanism in direct messages. But it also owns Twee.tt, which is more in line with its brand since it already uses Tweet throughout its product.
Losing Twitter could hurt bit.ly but with the recent addition of Amazon to their corporate URL shortening list, they are doing quite well. Bit.ly currently has 6,000 corporate clients, including amzn.to (Amazon), nyti.ms (NYTimes), huff.to (Huffington Post), and on.cnn.com (CNN).