14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone roots for the underdog and with enough hype you start to believe that the little guy can really threaten the established players. But every so often you are reminded that most of the times size does matter and MySpace demonstrated this handily when it unveiled the two-way sync feature with Twitter last week. The feature allowed MySpace users to tweet out their status messages and vice-versa and, maybe not that surprisingly, the social network has now become the second largest source for short links on the microblogging site.
Using data from Tweetmeme, TechCrunch found that MySpace's URL shortener, lnk.ms, rose up the ranks to become the second most popular shortener on Twitter with 17 percent of the entire links passed around originating from MySpace. Today it has dropped to almost 14 percent but still enough to maintain its second position.
To put this into perspective, Bit.ly, the URL shortening service used by Twitter by default, dominates the market with a share of around 70 percent followed by other established players with considerably smaller slices. TinyURL, which has been around for years and is one of the original services of its kind, only manages around 10 percent but that is still significantly higher than the rest, which hover at below 3 percent.
In one fell swoop, MySpace entered and gained a favorable position in a market many believed to be closed and extremely crowded and the irony is that it didn't even intend to or, most likely, even care as, so far, there hasn't been any real money to be made with URL shorteners. On the day the new feature launched, lnk.ms grew to account for 8.56 percent of the links on Twitter and has risen since. The link shortening service from MySpace actually launched six months ago but it wasn't until two-way sync was enabled that it really took off.
The new sync feature allows users to share their status updates from MySpace on Twitter with a link back to the social network and it also allows them to import their tweets and display them on MySpace. Finally, MySpace has done something in the past months ahead of Facebook instead of scrambling to find a solution to dropping revenue and traffic.
But the effect that the MySpace feature had begs the question of what will happen if, or more precisely when, Facebook decides to enable two-way Twitter sync which is now available only for Page admins. When Facebook finally rolls out the feature for all users, you can be sure there will be a flood of content on Twitter and it should be really interesting to see how that evolves and how the influx of new tweets will affect the ecosystem.