14 DAY TRIAL // Bit.ly is still the most popular URL shortener on Twitter, according to an analysis of over 1.5 million tweets. Twitpic.com, the photo sharing platform, is the second most popular domain on the microblogging site.
Cloud security firm Zscaler gathered 1.5 million links over a period of a few months to determine how many of them lead to malicious websites.
However, the data also shows which are the most popular domains in links on Twitter.
"I have scanned another 1.5 million links in the past 3 months from Twitter public time line (1,587,824 exactly)," Julien Sobrien, an engineer at Zscaler, wrote.
"I analyzed these URLs and the server content to find how many of them lead to malicious pages by running them through the Zscaler cloud," he said.
"Bit.ly is still the leader in number of URLs on Twitter at 33% of all URLs, compared to only 5% for the number 2 spot (twitpic.com)! However, its market share has decreased, mainly because of the arrival of new URL shortener services from big names," he explained.
Bit.ly's share dropped from 40 percent in March to 33 percent today, though the market as a whole has gotten bigger. Twitter has since stopped using Bit.ly as the default URL shortener and is now using its own service.
However, since Twitter's URL shortener automatically deflates the URLs, it doesn't show up in the statistics.
But there are a few interesting trends. One is the rise of Google's shortener, goo.gl. The service was initially introduced as the built in shortener for Google products, but has recently been launched as a stand-alone product.
Goo.gl had 2 percent of the market. Adding youtube.com and youtu.be, Google handled about 5 percent of the links shared on Twitter.
Also on the rise is Foursquare's shortener, 4sq.com, which is the tenth most shared domain on Twitter. Facebook's product, fb.me is at number 13.