Big surprise. There’s another URL shortening service that wants to throw its hat in the ring and into a field that’s pretty much saturated. Do we really need another URL shortener? Brinkster, the web-hosting startup behind Br.st seems to think so.
Similar to many of its competitors, Br.st offers statistics (in your own time zone) about your links, including number of clicks, referrers, and origin (by country or region) of all of the clicks. Bit.ly, which is one of the current leaders in the URL shortening space, offers all of these analytics as well. Additionally, Br.st filters submitted links through malware filters.
Br.st’s service lets you post to over 10 social networks and sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg, and will soon offer Google analytics. The site also offers bookmarklets to add to your toolbar. And Br.st has opened up its API. Br.st says that it will also offer image and filer sharing (similar to yFrog or TwiPic) and will let you see detailed stats on these links.
Though full of useful features, Br.st is entering a space that’s inundated competitors and it’s a dog eat dog world out there in the URL shortening field. It seems that every week, there’s a new URL shortener out on the market. TweetMeme just debuted its own URL shortening service, ReTwet.me. Of course, one URL shortener Tr.im, has dropped out of the race. And recently, Royal Pingdom conducted a study on which URL shortener was the fastest and Ow.ly and Bit.ly came out on top.