What will become of bit.ly?

Bit.ly is a wonderful link condenser with the added bonus of tracking link clicks and providing statistics about those links. We use it with this blog, and ECC Library also uses it to track the clicks on our Twitter and Facebook fan page feeds. One of the great assets of bit.ly is that it allows you to post your "Tweet" directly through its interface - there's no need to long into Twitter to do it - because of the relationship between the two services. However, Twitter's CEO Evan Williams just announced that Twitter is going to create its own link shortener which may mean a questionable fate for bit.ly. It remains to be seen whether the Twitter link shortener with feature tracking and statistics and whether bit.ly users will transition to it. This is something to be aware of if you use bit.ly to track student use of any of your links.