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Why don't they just make their own? Seems like keeping that data 'in house' would be wise.

"Bit.LY is a portfolio company of Betaworks, which is also an investor in Twitter"

From the perspective of the investors, they are keeping it "in house" By pairing work of two investments, they make both a little stronger (well, bitly a lot stronger).

Hoping some of the hype of twitter might rub off on bit.ly I'd say if I was skeptical. Still amazing bit.ly got funded.

Isn't this a libian domain name? Can that country/somebody there take it back if they want to?

Why does Twitter need URL shorteners at all?

Well, there's an argument to be made for them, when including the full URL in a message would cause it to exceed the SMS character limit.

However, there's no reason to use one (and lots of reasons not to) when the URL doesn't break the 140-character limit, or when the message isn't going out via the SMS gateway.

I'm not holding my breath for Twitter to implement such logic, though; they seem to have a truly unhealthy fascination with URL shorteners.

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