I can’t believe I’m saying this, but yet again, there’s another URL shortening service on the Internet. Br.st thinks that they’ll be able to make a significant footprint in the URL shortening realm and take away some of that valued marketshare from Bit.ly and TinyURL.com. However, this worries me considering just how many other short URL services have gone down under lately.
With that said though, Br.st thinks that they’ll be able to get over this presumed failure by introducing local time zone based statistics, which they say won’t include bot traffic. Even more exciting is the fact that they’ll give you the ability to visually compare statistics between three different metrics at the same time.
This isn’t something we haven’t seen before though. Bit.ly has their own statistics program that work with their links, similar to to what Br.st is offering. However, there’s another addition that Br.st plans to release very soon, which is the sharing of images and files. If they’re successful with this, I believe that it may be the way for them to bash their way out of the list of potential link shortening failures.
I’d be curious to see what you guys think. Would you give Br.st a try or will you just stick with traditional URL shortening services such as Bit.ly? What do you look for in these services? Is there anything special that you’d like to see from them?