Update | 6:29 p.m. Adding the company’s explanation for its chosen domain name.
Eagle-eyed fans of Twitter and The New York Times may have noticed a change in the Web addresses used to share some articles from The Times’s Web site on Twitter. Beginning Wednesday, the links are compressed into a custom New York Times URL that begins with “nyti.ms.”
The customized links are powered by Bit.ly, a New York-based start-up that has become the de facto service for trimming unwieldy Web addresses into bite-sized, easily shareable links.
The partnership is part of Bit.ly’s new Pro service, which creates custom URLs for a number of Web sites and publishers, including Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Associated Content, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Onion, among others.
The Times service is still in beta and is only available through TimesPeople, a tool for sharing news articles and other material on NYTimes.com and through social networks. Eventually the company plans to expand the use of the links to other sites like Facebook, said Stacy Green, public relations manager for The Times.
A footnote for curious geeks: The “.ms” top-level domain officially belongs to Montserrat, a tiny British territory in the Caribbean, but domain names ending in “.ms” can be registered by anyone.
Update: Some readers have asked why The Times is using “nyti.ms” instead of “nyt.com,” which is the same number of characters and perhaps a little friendlier. Ms. Green said nyt.com was already in use and would have required existing links to be changed, “and we felt it was important to get our short URL in the marketplace sooner rather than later.” She said the company could choose to use the Bit.ly service with other domain names in the future.