Bundling Links
Given my previous venture, you might be aware that content aggregation on the Internet has always been one of my favorite activities. URL shorteners although deceiving have proved to be useful on Twitter due to paucity of characters. But without context, people are always less willing to click on them. Bit.ly, one of the premier URL shortening services have tried to eliminate some confusion while retaining the short form. Branding in terms of the links they point to has been one strategy. E.g. links to Yahoo news stories are yhoo.it, C-SPAN links are cs.pn, etc. However, links couldn’t be tagged or categorized so you have to describe each link or even worse, shorten eachlink before sending it out. This was highly inefficient. Here is a tweet by @daddy_san on links he visits when he is down.
[blackbirdpie id="4981067933028352"]
As you see, it looks very messy and you aren’t even sure how many links he has embedded much less what each one points to. If you click on them, you realize, they point to individual tweets by other people – different people. Wouldn’t it be convenient if all those tweets could be bundled under one heading and better still, under one URL. Bit.ly now lets you do exactly that. Bit.ly Bundles lets you ‘bundle’ various links and let you give it a title and share it to your followers. I bundled @daddy_san‘s links and created a ‘Cheer up, dude’ bundle that you can access with a single bookmark. Obviously, it too is in form of a shortened URL.
Best of all, not only does it bundle all the links but it also extracts all the tweets on a single page so all you have to do is scroll through them to get your dose of cheer. Although I’m not sure, I bet other forms of rich media like images and videos will be similarly embedded. Of course, you would’ve to click through to read long-form stories
The possibilities are endless and you can create bundles of aggregated links on topics either on current affairs or certain issues and share it on Twitter. For e.g. a video compilation of individual YouTube links of Sachin Tendulkar’s best sixes, or all news opinions of how Sarah Palin couldn’t get her endorsed-candidate to win in her home state of Alaska, etc.
Go forth and bundle. Or be the second one.
- http://www.iastron.com Kulin Shah
