Imagine your product being the de facto service used to serve over thirty million plus people on a near daily basis. Sounds great, right? Sure it does and whatever company that doesn’t love that would nearly be stupid not to. It’s a great deal, especially if your business is just up and coming, but while it is a great deal for the company’s product that has become a de facto feature on a popular service, it is not such a great deal for the consumer or a potential competitor.
A perfect example of this (which so happens to be the focus of this post) is the deal between micro-blogging giant Twitter and URL shortening service Bit.ly. Bit.ly, as we all know, is the default shortener for the Twitter web interface and in effect has become the default shortener for many popular third party applications. Previous to that, tinyURL was the default shortener owning a vast amount of the market share, but when Bit.ly became the default shortener that quickly changed.
This makes it difficult to near impossible to garner a respectable user base as well as traffic for a competing product. This has been recently brought up with the original shut-down of semi-known URL shortening service, tr.im. In a company blog post explaining the decision to shut-down the service (which was later retracted) some of the blame was placed on Twitter’s favoritism with Bit.ly and while this may seem too many to be “whining” it is actually a valid argument.
Imagine if Twitter decided that tinyURL was simply “good enough”. I think it is safe to assume that tinyURL would own the majority of the URL shortening market share hands down even though it is near featureless. This is especially true since the mainstream audience is adopting Twitter at a faster pace than the nerds who are willing to explore as well as adopt better alternatives. This would have a negative effect for both the users of Twitter and the competitors to tinyURL who might have far better offerings.
Now, we can be thankful that this did not happen and that Bit.ly is a far superior (as well as dependable) shortening service compared to its competitors. But this begs the question; will it always be that way? We all know that Twitter has bigger fish to fry such as competing with Facebook real-time search and, you know, keeping their site up. Adding default support for the latest and greatest shortener I am sure is not on their list of things to be concerned about.
While I have only talked about shorteners in this post due to the recent debacle, the situation can also apply to third-party applications. If Twitter decided to buy or officially support a specific Twitter client, you can bet your money that other Twitter applications would die in the cold. With Twitter’s massive reach comes a lot of influence and that influence, I believe, is creating monopolies. And no matter how good Twitter’s intentions are, this is both bad for the consumer and the potential competitor.
