You'd be hard pressed to find an aspiring banker or model or writer or actor who would need much convincing to move to New York City. Not so with tech folks. In the face of competition from the Valley and giants like Facebook and Twitter, suddenly in our midst, seven startups have banded together for a campaign called Come Work in New York that promises to ply talented developers, designers, and "business people" with $5,000 to help them move to the city if they're hired.

The list of participating companies, includes some of New York's most high-profile startups: Bit.ly, Yipit, Aviary, Ordr.in, Tutorspree, ChatID, and Dispatch. But just because they're willing to pay up doesn't make them humble. In bold lettering, the website declares, "NEW YORK IS THE GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD," and then proceeds to list reasons it is "Better" and "Awesomerer" than whenever you're living now:

TRUTH: We have the smartest and best looking people in the world, including Scarlett Johansson.

TRUTH: We have the world's best and most diverse restaurant scene. There are 23,499 here. You can eat at a different restaurant every night for the next 64.38 years.

TRUTH: Our public transit system is better than yours. Six hundred and sixty miles of tracks running 24 hours a day.

TRUTH: Speaking of tracks, you may have heard this little ditty Jay-Z and Alicia Keys wrote about us a few years ago?

You gotta give them credit. Given the desperation for devs we've been hearing about, $5,000 seems like a small-ish signing bonus. But a splashy landing page, some community spirit, and bada bing: new hiring strategy.

Mr. Wanamaker.

DIVERSITY. Black Techies Meetup is tonight. "This meetup exists because I was damn tired of being the only black person at other tech meetups," says Tumblr dev Kyle Wanamaker. "We aim to be a network of developers in NYC interested in becoming better, learning from each other and networking. Developers of all skill levels are welcome, from experienced hardcore, neckbeard hackers, to n00bs. If you want to be awesome, or more awesome, I hope you can find yourself at home here." 7 p.m., at Tumblr's HQ.

HOLIDAY GIVING. "Reqoop, an NYC-based startup that enables shoppers to share discoveries they make from brick-and-mortar stores, while they’re out shopping, and earn rewards for sharing their finds...  just kicked off a campaign to help raise funds for goods for good, a NYC & Malawai-based organization that takes excess and surplus goods, like fabrics and school and health supplies, and creates opportunities for communities in Malawi (goods4good.org). The campaign is called "Snap for Good" and it's pretty straightforward: for every style find that shoppers snap using the Reqoop app while they're out shopping in December, we will donate $1 to goods for good. We're hoping to raise $2,000."

UPDATE. General Assembly-based Bubble has made some updates to its app. "We're taking Bubbles (hashtags) and attaching them to interests to let you follow them in a different way, by discovering what everyone is sharing about that interest," founder Lee Hnetinka wrote to Betabeat in an email. "So maybe you like Dubset? Join the Bubble for it and whenever someone shares a song they're listening with the hashtag #dubset, you'll be able to discover it."

TRACKIN UR MEDIAS. "Adaptly helps companies advertise on social networks not just for clicks, but to increase engagement. Today it unveiled its new standard for how that is measured. Adaptly Momentum tracks over 160+ interaction criteria across all major social networks so its clients can measure the effect of paid, earned and owned media."

WHO IS HIRING. Charlie O'Donnell seeks an intern for his newsletter, This Week in the NYC Innovation Community, which he sends out every week. He imagines about five to seven hours a week. "It will be paid, but not terribly much," he writes. Go work at betaworks! Bit.ly seeks a "sales research associate," and News.me seeks a senior iOS developer and Python engineer.

The chiefly scientific Ms. Mason

Twitter tweeted out a post today spreading the word that, "We're about to start wrapping all URLs regardless of their length with the t.co URL wrapper." But chief scientist Hilary Mason told Betabeat it's no big deal for bit.ly. "We don't expect to see any changes," she emailed.

Ms. Mason pointed out that Twitter has essentially been doing the same thing since August 24th. "The only change is that they will now wrap links under twenty characters, which means that there will actually be tweets longer than 140 characters," she wrote, adding, "It hasn't had much of an effect on bitly. We provide public analytics that people love!" (It's true, Betabeat does spend perhaps too much time on the bit.ly's Info Page showing when and where your tweets were accessed.)

That doesn't mean everyone remains unscathed by Twitter's announcement, however. As Ms. Mason noted, "It's much more of an issue for Twitter app developers than for us!"

Update: Perhaps we typed too fast? As Tom Critchlow, VP of Operations at Distilled NYC was quick to point out, if bit.ly's strength is metadata, it may soon have some  competition in that arena as well.  "Twitter is definitely planning on rolling out more robust analytics," Mr. Critchlow wrote Betabeat via Skype. As he pointed out, "This will likely be publisher driven (i.e. not public, but you can analyze the tweets of a site you control). So not quite killing all the features of bit.ly. But most of the use for bit.ly (via Twitter) that I see right now is from marketers who want to manage and track their own Twitter activity and I can imagine Twitter analytics providing a large part of that." For more general link shortening, Mr. Critchlow hypothesized,  "bit.ly is still the defacto choice."

On the Distilled NYC blog back in August, Mr. Critchlow noted that Distilled received fewer direct visits than it had on the same day of the week for the previous six months after Twitter rolled out its t.co shortener.

"Obviously Hilary has access to data that I don't and likely has more of a clue about bit.ly's traffic stats," Mr. Critchlow acknowledged. Indeed, we don't know if marketers (or, ehem, bloggers, are the service's only power users). "But it feels to me like once Twitter analytics roll out there will be much less of a need for bit.ly in the Twitter ecosystem," he wrote.

Based on unverified Quantcast data, bit.ly's traffic has been dropping since April, before Twitter started wrapping their URLs. But Ms. Mason responded by email, "I'm not familiar with how Quantcast calculates those numbers, but I doubt that it fully considers the bit.ly API or HTTP 301 redirects, which is where we see the majority of our traffic."

"You also need to keep in mind that Twitter is only one social network," she added. "Bit.ly is used widely across many networks. I'll also reiterate my earlier point, which is that Twitter has been wrapping almost all links since August -- I don't see why wrapping the tiny remaining percentage will make a difference in how people use bit.ly."

Today the betaworks announced it had acquired Twitterfeed, which currently has almost 4 million users exporting their RSS feeds to Twitter and Facebook, and was already a close partner of the betaworks. The acquistion will simply deepen the integration between the two, explain Peter Stern, who became bit.ly CEO back in May.

"The publishing workflow provided by Twitterfeed constitutes a core part of the bitly ecosystem. Along with other products (such as SocialFlow and dlvr.it) that use bitly to share content and track engagement, Twitterfeed is both creating and consuming gobs of bitly data every day. Twitterfeed had over a million active users last month, and we look forward to empowering them with even more actionable insight from bitly data. We also look forward to bringing the enhanced sharing functionality of Twitterfeed directly to bitly.com, making it easier than ever to collect, organize, shorten and share links."

Peter Kafka landed on a site dedicated to News.me, a project that originated with the NYT R&D lab but was then spun out to betaworks, which has the bit.ly data about how people share some 8 billion links each month, raw fuel to power a great social reading experience. A subscription will cost $0.99 a week or $34.99 a year.

For the price, you get a clean, Instapaper style view of articles from the participating publishers. Users can also peek at the streams of other users, a sort of Being John Malkovich experience that may prove interesting for news junkies caught in a RSS rut. For privacy's sake you can only peek into the streams of folks who follow you on Twitter.

There is no official word on when Apple will approve this app, so its possible the website will prove to be nothing but a big tease for a while longer.

"Last week the agency we used to register the letter.ly domain was taken down as a side effect of the war in Libya. Our domain registration expired and, and we were unable to renew it. As the expiration propagated, the site appears to be dead and emails sent to your subscribers probably bounced," the Letter.ly team wrote in an email to users.

As Betabeat's Adrianne Jeffries reported back in March, a number of sites saw prominent companies like bit.ly using the Libyan domain and assumed it was safe for them. Many have now taken on second homes, just in case the real world tumult continues to spread to the web.  - Bb

The popular URL-shortening service leases its catchy domain from the Libyan government, as do all Web properties with the .ly suffix, so the turmoil in Libya—and the government's shutdown of Internet access—made it a pertinent question for users.

Mr. Borthwick insisted service would continue without interruption, since most of the relevant infrastructure is located outside Libya.

"Should Libya block Internet traffic, as Egypt did, it will not affect http://bit.ly or any .ly domain.  For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative *all* have to be offline, or responding with empty responses.   Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya," Mr. Borthwick wrote on Quora.

But according to a representative from ICANN, the international corporation that administers Web addresses, a 28-day Internet outage in Libya would take down Bit.ly—in addition to Page.ly, Things.ly, Friend.ly, GeneralAssemb.ly and so on—until a connection was restored. Bit.ly links would cease to function.

Since such domains are purchased through brokers, many busy entrepreneurs give little thought to the nations behind them.

"We didn't know it was Libyan until we tried to register it," Sachin Kamdar, CEO of Parse.ly, told TheObserver. "We figured if Bit.ly thought it was O.K., then we would be fine."

A monthlong Libyan Internet outage is considered unlikely. But the issue calls attention to the fragility of so-called vanity URLs. In October, the country shut down the "sex positive" URL-shortening service vb.ly without warning, calling it "offensive" and "scandalous."

Alarmed by the vb.ly news, entrepreneur Julia West researched inlu.st, the domain she uses for her dating start-up. "It comes from São Tomé and Principe, an island nation off of the Western coast of Africa," she said. "They speak Portuguese."

Did she know there had been an attempted coup there in 2009, The Observer wondered? "I was not aware of the coup d'état," she said. She has a .com version "in case of emergency."

Blip.tv's domain hails from Tuvalu, near Fiji in the South Pacific. "I heard it might go under," co-founder Dina Kaplan said, referring to rising sea levels. "We should take a blip vacation there."