DailyBlogr - Scraping on Twitter : How to find out who’s stealing your bitly links

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I know what you’re thinking now. Original Content on Twitter? “Your” Bitly links ? – Move on Mani !

Well, this isn’t a personal post. But rather a question raised towards a seemingly silly issue, by some seemingly silly people on Twitter. I have this thing with “seemingly silly” things, simply because in most cases, they turn out to be not-so-silly. Anyways, that’s not what I wanted to say … here’s what the issue is.

Recently, there have been some strong complaints on Twitter about some users copying the bitly URL from other users, and re-tweeting them without attributing. May be this is new to you, but this is for real. Some very popular Twitter users are the ones who’re accused of this and so far, nobody has made any comment or bothered to explain why they do it ?

In my opinion this is what happens.

Some popular tweeps, who’re always on the lookout for “popular content”, manages to find out either…

1) The most re-tweeted Twitter links OR

2) The most popular bitly links on Twitter

They probably get this done with an aggregator or some RT app data.

Without caring to bother who created the link, they simply copy paste the bitly URLs (and stories) on to their Twitter feeds.

Most of the times, they don’t do it with the intention of copying, but looks like that some people are bothered. Because certain pages which were built or found by some tweeps get popular and one fine day someone else copies their links, and that too without attribution, that can be awful !

So how do you find out who’s the original creator of an URL known to bitly ?

Just copy the last part of any bitly URL. Let’s say – bit.ly/abcd

Then go to http://www.bit.ly/info/ and paste the last part there.. like http://www.bit.ly/info/abcd

Now, bit.ly will show you the guy (if registered user) who created the URL first.

http://www.dailybloggr.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/stealingbitly.jpg

Though this may not be the surest method known, it could be right in most cases. Or at least until we know of something better. If you know one, please feel free to share.

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