YouTube Now Has a URL Shortener

YouTube has launched its own URL shortener, but it is not like other URL-shorteners, because it can only be used specifically with YouTube videos. This way, YouTube says, when you click on one, you know you're going to a YouTube video no matter what. That should certainly cut down on the likelihood that you could be going to a malicious site.

YouTube's URL-shortener is at Youtu.be, although if you go there, you will just be taken to the YouTube home page. You can use the shortener manually though. If you take a video URL and replace the part that says "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" with "http://youtu.be/" and you will have your short URL.

"It's all the rage: link shorteners to ensure that those useful URLs you're sharing don't take up too much precious character count while also giving you an inkling of what you're about to click on," says Engineering Manager Vijay Karunamurthy.

"Also, because the link contains the ID of the video you're going to see, developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time," adds Karunamurthy.

Users can use the AutoShare feature on YouTube to link their YouTube account to other social networks. This way, whenever the user "favorites" a video on YouTube, the action will get syndicated to the other networks. People on those networks will see the shortened version of the YouTube URL.

Have You Read This?

> Google Now Has Its Own URL Shortener

> Facebook URL Shortener Makes Appearance

>  Ushering In a Whole New Era of Linking Questions

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Takes Over Social Media

Shhh, can you hear that? What you're hearing is the collective shrieks from Twihards everywhere as The Twilight Saga: New Moon is upon us. For those of you asking yourself, what is a Twihard? I’ve included the definition below.

twi-hard noun
A serious/obsessive reader of the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, one leap above Twilighters.

Are you a Twilight fan? Do you plan on seeing the movie? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

Currently the Twilight Saga is all the rage, and seems to have taken over almost every aspect of social media. If you venture over to MySpace.com you’ll see that the homepage has been New Moonified. It should be noted that New Moon & MySpace seem to share the same demographic, Tweens... so it only makes sense to try and grab those pageviews.



MySpace has been all about some New Moon here lately, as they just hosted an exclusive stream of the red carpet during the films premiere, which pulled in 3 million viewers. Did you watch any of the red carpet stream? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

Over on Twitter, Twilight holds 3 of the top 10 trending topics including the highly coveted top spot.

If you search for "New Moon" on Twitter it seems like you need to constantly refresh so you can see the hundreds of new Tweets. Below is an interesting graph, which shows the buzz over New Moon, comparing blogs to Twitter. You can obviously see the drastic climb just from last month, as the hype around the movie grew with each day.



YouTube is even trying to cash-in on the New Moon craze by adding a “Twihard” box atop their site that states the following, "The world is gripped by Twilight mania these days and on YouTube that translates into videos that celebrate, discuss and even mock the cultural phenomenon."



Like I said before, New Moon hits theatres today and is expected to make somewhere between 85 million – 100 million dollars this weekend, and could possibly break some box office records when it’s all said and done. It’s already broken the advance ticket sales record, previously held by Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. How much do you think New Moon will make when it's all said and done? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

It'll be interesting to compare New Moon's "social media status" against the next film in the saga when it hits the cinema around this same time next year, to see if it stil has the same amount of hype around it.

Why do you think Twilight is such a huge success? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... know your honest opinion.

Twitter Conferences Are All The Rage

As part of the Internet marketing industry have you done the conference circuit? Have you been to SES, SMX (put cardinal direction here), Adtech, PubCon etc, etc? On a yearly basis how many of these trips can you justify or get away with? Well, with shrinking budgets everywhere now you have to add the new spate of Twitter conferences to your hit list of things you absolutely have to do to get out of the office learn more about the industry.

TechCrunch tells us of the growing list of conferences that are starting to sprout up as a result of the use of (or confusion around the use of) Twitter for business purposes.

It looks like the trend of Twitter conferences is growing, with more events popping up around the country. As we’ve said in the past and will continue to say, there are tremendous opportunities for businesses, brands, non-profits and individuals to use Twitter as a tool for customer support, fund raising, brand management, advertising, job search and much more.

I have not attended one but I can imagine they must be pretty quiet because everyone is likely to be talking to everyone but those right in front of them. I gotta tell ya that when someone tweets that they are talking to someone I wonder if they are even listening to them or concentrating on their 140 characters of brilliance they are allowing the rest of their audience to ingest.

Of course, if you attended the 140 Character Conference in New York in June the venue itself (which was literally underground) forced Twitterheads to actually listen to others since there was practically no connectivity for the attendees.

Twitter is so fascinating in that it appears that so many folks are finding ways to monetize the service without the service monetizing itself. At least with Google (which face it, is why most of these conferences exist in the first place) makes money and knows that these conferences will only help it make more.

So if you are tired of the usual shows and you need more opportunities to ‘network’ then think about these:

• TWTRCN 09 DC- for non profits and government types. October 22 in Washington, DC.
• 140 Twitter Conference / LA – Endorsed by Biz Stone. Need we say more? September in Los Angeles (for those who didn’t get the LA part of the title).
• 140 Characters Twitter Conference – Jeff Pulver’s deal goes west coast on October 27th in Los Angeles.
• Cool Twitter Conferences- Apparently this is a traveling road show that has stops scheduled in Boston and San Francisco.

So don’t miss your chance to blow off work get out and learn more about Twitter and the future of communications. Hotel bars in the areas of these meetings can’t wait to serve you!

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