YouTube Adds Shortened URL (Youtu.be), Sets Stage For More Sharing

If you had to guess what the future of the web might be, I think you can look no further than the past week of major web properties creating their own shortened URL’s.  We had Google and Facebook last week launch their own shortened URL’s with “goo.gl and fb.me” respectively.  And also last week, YouTube added a new AutoShare function to profile activity feeds.

And now YouTube has just announced their own shortened URL – youtu.be

The Web Is Becoming More Social

All of these moves are geared specifically to facilitate more sharing of content.  Whether it’s video from YouTube, or updates from friends on Facebook, the web is becoming more of social platform for content to distributed from its users.

And shortened URL’s facilitate this sharing by eleminating the long, arduous URL’s that are typically associated with domains.

One thing I find interesting is this – from Google, to Facebook, and now to YouTube, they are all following a shortened URL pattern that facilitates sharing on Twitter.  Only Twitter has a very limiting character range (140 character spaces per tweet).  And it now seems that everyone is creating shortened URL’s so that sharing on Twitter is more easily facilitated.

Is it possible that the not only is the future of the web found in sharing, but sharing mostly over Twitter?

What do you think?