A Twitter update is simple and fast and gets the information and news, and it spreads it very quickly, and it can contain links so you can then link to this whole context of information.
You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.
If you look at my Twitter feed it is 99% links, but 1% is me responding and 1% of a big number is a big number.
It can be a little scary. Like one time I posted a link to NPR because I thought it was interesting, and it took down their Web site.
If there is a viral video on the Internet, you know it's on YouTube. You can search for it, find it, see the view count, and then take that link and share it with whomever you want. That's what we are doing for images.
I joined bit.ly as chief scientist in October of 2009. The company is a URL-shortener and content-sharing platform; we provide tools for people to share and track links on the Internet.
I was really excited by the idea that people were sharing information now and discovering information in a totally new way on the Internet via Twitter and Facebook, yet that experience was pretty clunk and just lots of bit.ly links.
Reddit strives to be a community-oriented link-sharing and news site, which means that all our content is submitted and voted on by members of our community. We don't interfere with that process at all, either in an editorial or curation capacity.
Nobody really cares about short links, but people do care about saving and sharing content.
