Amazon's shortened URLs will appear as amzn.to/ followed by a combination of six letters and numbers. The third-party service Bitly.pro will power Amazon's service, . Twitter confirmed that it will launch its own URL shortener, but didn't say what it will be called or if a third-party would power it. But Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams said users probably won't be able to choose alternative shortening services.
Size Matters
Twitter's decision could cause all sorts of problems for the URL shortening business as a whole. It will definitely harm smaller services such as is.gd and tinyurl, as their livelihood is already hurt by the prominence of bit.ly. Even bit.ly itself won't be safe if Twitter picks its own service instead.
For Web users, the death of any shortened URL service leaves open the possibility that its links will disappear. So far, we haven't seen any major disasters, but last year, , and it no longer accepts new URLs except through application programming interfaces.
Another potential problem, as my colleague J.R. Raphael , is that shortened URLs powered by Twitter would likely rely on Twitter's servers for redirection. If you've ever seen , you know reliability can be an issue.
On the other hand, a Twitter-hosted URL shortener would add long-term stability to links. If Twitter is handling the shortened URLs, you know those links in your feed will stick around for as long as Twitter does.
For similar reasons, I don't see much harm in custom shortened URLs. If major players like Amazon, the New York Times (nyti.ms) and the Huffington Post (huff.to) are all paying to use bitly.pro, it's unlikely those links will die, and bit.ly becomes a more viable business in the process.
The question is whether Twitter's URL shortener is on a crash course with Web sites who'd rather use their own custom shortened URLs. They need to reach a compromise, lest URL shortening business get any messier.