URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.
Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers.
We've been waiting for a more intelligent URL shortening service to hit the market but even in our most ambitious visions we haven't seen something like this coming. We hope you'll use it - the more we all do, the more everyone will benefit.
At launch Bit.ly is a relatively sophisticated URL shortener. It uses a cookie to remember the last 15 links you've shortened and displays that history on the home page when you visit. It allows you to set up a custom URL ending for your link. It automatically creates 3 thumbnails for every page you save a link to.
How about these features, though? Bit.ly saves a cached copy forever of every page you shorten a link to, on Amazon's S3 storage (processing is done on EC2, as well, so uptime looks good). Bit.ly also tracks clickthrough numbers and referrers so you can see what kind of traffic your shortcut got and from where. There's a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to any other web app (Betaworks affiliated gaming site ImInLikeWithYou already has this live) and all the data, including traffic data and thumbnails, is easily accessible by XML and JSON feeds.
Those are some pretty awesome features but that's only the beginning. A javascript submission bookmarklet and user accounts should be available soon. (Update: Bit.ly just added a simple bookmarklet that will make it easier to use casually.)
In the background, Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we've written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.
As if that's not a whole lot of awesome already - Bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of all the web pages it collects.
You want to see all the web pages related to the US Presidential election, Barack Obama and Asheville, North Carolina? Or about Technology, Google and The Dalles, Oregon? That will be what Bit.ly delivers if it can build up a substantial database of pages. Once it does, it will open that data up to other developers as well.
Why use a URL shortener to catalog all those pages? Why not? Each shortcut signals a page that's of importance to a real human user and an army of link-senders sounds like a great way to build up that database. Semantic indexing of the web through casual but opt-in and common user activity is a great strategy.
Then we can all share access to that data. We're excited and we hope you'll put Bit.ly to use.
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great stuff! and I just checked /oliver/ for my ormigo profile which has geo information to see what it finds out about it.
Posted by: Oliver Thylmann
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July 8, 2008 12:05 PM
great writeup- it looks like bitly took my advice on the stats - it's a great thing to have - the thing is - whats the business model on all of these url shortners? if they are used to pimp the company behind them, great - but can you really make money on them?
Posted by: allen stern | July 8, 2008 12:09 PM
Sounds really cool. I always thought these url shortening services had a lot more potential than what they were being used for, and it seems bit.ly is opening the door to that and pushing out some very interesting ideas.
I'll be using this and following it very closely, I'm really interested in how all of it plays out.
Posted by: Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 8, 2008 12:10 PM
Marshall thanks for the great writeup and the enthusiasm.
Allen, I'm part of the team, and there is definitely a business model. We'll hopefully be able to explain that in full in the next few weeks. In the meantime just enjoy it and hopefully use it. :-)
Posted by: Dave Winer | July 8, 2008 12:14 PM
So am I reading it right that bit.ly is innovating where delicious should have been for the past two years?
Posted by: Josh Morgan | July 8, 2008 12:14 PM
Bit.ly is tremendous AND a mention of Asheville on your esteemed blog!
Thanks, Marshall.
Sam
Posted by: Sam Harrelson
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July 8, 2008 12:22 PM
hmm, seems like a nice replacement for smallr, have to check its bookmarklet
Posted by: Marcos Marado
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July 8, 2008 12:22 PM
But it's one character longer than is.gd! :)
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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July 8, 2008 12:25 PM
good point @Sarah, those features better be worth the character
Posted by: Dobromir Hadzhiev
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July 8, 2008 12:27 PM
I will try it out, just 'cause you recommend it Marshall, but its gonna be tough to beat the humor ( and utility ) provided by http://icanhaz.com
I CAN HAZ let's you, the user, type in your own custom short URL, and if you choose one that already exists, Blofeld's cat from SPECTRE says "I made you nothin!"
Posted by: Todd | July 8, 2008 12:27 PM
+1 Sarah. But it's got tracking!
Posted by: Shey
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July 8, 2008 12:28 PM
Experimenting with it on my latest blog post. The stats are crazy cool http://bit.ly/info.php?id=2lkCBU
Posted by: Bwana McCall
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July 8, 2008 12:28 PM
Is the API live yet? When I click on the API link on the bit.ly homepage, I'm shown a URL to the betaworks homepage.
Posted by: Bryan
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July 8, 2008 12:30 PM
Finaly something that has stats. It'll help evaluate multiple ways of promoting blogs and services (so far Google analytics is failing me a bit on that). Business model? I'd say you can always stick ads in between, sell usage data or charge premium users for premium features (advanced analytics, multiple shortcuts for one page etc., auto posting on twitter, plugins).
Posted by: Marcin Grodzicki | July 8, 2008 12:49 PM
It's official, I dump smallr in favour of bitly!
Posted by: Marcos Marado
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July 8, 2008 12:51 PM
Sounds like it will be very cool. Building a thumbnail is taking forever though.
Posted by: eas | July 8, 2008 1:06 PM
very cool
Posted by: Jesse Pickard
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July 8, 2008 1:09 PM
This looks great. Now we just need support for it to be added to Twhirl.
Posted by: Mark Krynsky
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July 8, 2008 1:23 PM
Did anyone else found it hilarious that Marshall used is.gd to link?
Posted by: Stepan Mazurov
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July 8, 2008 1:44 PM
Interesting. Does anyone know how search engines treat links made with a shortener from an SEO perspective? I like the Bit.ly concept, but it would be somewhat concerning if the pages that people link to don't get the SEO benefits of an inbound link due to the redirect. If this service took off, would the sites that are being linked to loose their Google juice?
Posted by: Joe Lazarus | July 8, 2008 1:51 PM
There's Tweetburner who does a bunch of this already...
Posted by: callingbull | July 8, 2008 1:59 PM
I like this one and the API is a great idea, but it doesn't do the autocopy to clipboard when a URL is created. I know that's a fairly simple add but it's not there currently.
I still like http://is.gd for the time being and it's also built into twhirl, which I use often.
Thx for the write-up!
Posted by: Chuck Reynolds
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July 8, 2008 2:00 PM
I found a bookmarklet for bit.ly, and replaced TinyURL bookmarklet. Fingers crossed.
Posted by: Todd Defren
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July 8, 2008 2:04 PM
I think it's time for a URL shortener crash test. In this case, please don't ignore http://urlborg.com/ it's already mature and does so much more.
Posted by: Panayotis Vryonis | July 8, 2008 2:05 PM
But any stats will be heavily biased toward sites that need short URLs, against those that don't. IOW, if you already have nice short URLs on your site, you won't get into the stats as much as someone who has atrocious URLs. Is that a "good thing"?
Also, in my own experience, I shorten URLs for one person and for many and everything in between. Using a shortener, ISTM, says very little if anything about the importance of the target site, even to me. I sometimes even shorten one just for myself for one use!
Frankly, I don't see what all the hoopla's about, especially the stats. I think there is a good business model for URL shortening, but I'll wait to see what these guys have come up with before I jump in.
Posted by: David Lewis | July 8, 2008 2:06 PM
Works quite well, but their API is not working.
Posted by: deemeetree | July 8, 2008 2:34 PM
I setup a simple link shortener and added a few of these features but nothing near as comprehensive. I guess it's time to close my link shortener ;)
Posted by: Patrick Jarrett | July 8, 2008 2:40 PM
This seems like one big single point of failure.
Much like tinyurl.
Stay away!!
Posted by: Johnny Fry | July 8, 2008 2:46 PM
It's amazing how URL shortners have grown in complexity and features. It'll be interesting to see how well Bit.ly is adopted.
James
blog.jvf.com
Posted by: James | July 8, 2008 2:55 PM
Updated bit.ly documentation now available. Keep those comments coming! http://bit.ly/2m6hMA
Posted by: Nathan Folkman | July 8, 2008 2:56 PM
Bit.ly looks cool, but cool isn't always next to useful. I do believe that the single most important feature of a url shortener is giving power back to the domain's owner, maybe the url-shortener-crash-test idea of panayotis vryonis, mentioned earlier in the comments, is truly needed :)
Posted by: george tziralis | July 8, 2008 3:34 PM
http://urlvi.be/ has been doing stats for years
Posted by: Lee | July 8, 2008 4:00 PM
I like using Bit.ly a lot better than Tiny. For multiple URLs I use fuseURL.
Posted by: Cory | July 8, 2008 4:10 PM
In time, I hope bit.ly auto-generates and auto-copies the link a-la is.gd, adds tags a-la del.icio.us, and supports services such as Twitter a-la the "TwitIt" bookmarklet. All to save a few keystrokes, I know, but that's what spurs adoption (at least with me).
Posted by: Kawika Holbrook
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July 8, 2008 4:41 PM
Nice. But http://snipr.com has had many features for quite a while. The http referer tracking is cool though.
Posted by: Erick | July 8, 2008 5:25 PM
Not bad. But what's the business model here? Is bit.ly planning to package and sell the stats in some way? Unless I'm missing something there doesn't really appear to be anything innovative or interesting here... Yet-Another-Link-Shortener... ;-)
Posted by: glenn | July 8, 2008 6:20 PM
Just cranked out an AIR app that lets me drag and drop URLs to turn them into Bit.ly urls. Great find Marshall!
Posted by: Ryan Stewart
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July 8, 2008 7:20 PM
Hi,Some great tips & tricks here,.Thanks for all the useful info!!Through web traffic that occurs in your site, you will determine if it really works out the way you planned it.
Posted by: Web Traffic Analysis | July 9, 2008 4:03 AM
Doesn't seem to work in IE7 (not that I use IE, but having consistency across browsers is a bit of a biggie for a url shortner...). Shame.
Posted by: Mike | July 9, 2008 4:58 AM
shame that it doesn't copy to the clipboard by default - the less clicks with these short URL generators the better ..
Posted by: Matt Hooper
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July 9, 2008 6:38 AM
Hey -- another Betaworks site without a privacy policy!
(Seriously, for this -- and especially for Twitabit, which ASKS FOR YOUR TWITTER USERNAME AND PASSWORD -- how hard would it be to give your users a policy they can rely on about how you're using their data?!?
Posted by: Jason | July 9, 2008 7:11 AM
For some reason every time I try it it just plain doesn't work.
Posted by: Michael | July 9, 2008 7:26 AM
Ryan, can we see that AIR app? sounds great
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 9, 2008 10:08 AM
If it's so fantastic - why are you using is.gd ? :-) Seriously, bit.ly does look interesting and more than the usual URL shortener.
Posted by: Andy C
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July 9, 2008 10:09 AM
Looks like they are running a hybrid of .Net code at their colo along with backend web services on Amazon. They should also look into creating a brandable web service that other platforms could leverage to get the analytical data. For instance, how about a Wordpress plug-in?
Posted by: Jim McCusker
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July 9, 2008 10:24 AM
OK, so now I've played with it a bit, and while it's a pretty cool concept and implementation, it's a TERRIBLE web neighbor -- bit.ly *totally* ignores the cache controls that authors can put on their pages, meaning that it's caching pages it has absolutely no right to be caching.
http://q.queso.com/archives/002296
I'd hope that this was an oversight rather than a design choice -- but even so, if it's an oversight, it's a huge one since it sort of amounts to pissing in the web pool.
Posted by: Jason | July 9, 2008 10:24 AM
Yeah Marshall... What's up with using is.gd to plug bit.ly? :-p
Posted by: Aaron Brazell
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July 9, 2008 10:29 AM
ok already! is.gd is baked into Twhirl! hopefully Twhirl will sign up with Bit.ly soon, huh?
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 9, 2008 10:30 AM
I personally like PlumURL as my link shortening service. It lets you add arbitrary keywords to your link, pushing the non-human-readable code out to the end of the link. Plus you can leave a sticky note on the page for visitors. Pretty slick.
http://plumurl.com
Posted by: Dave C | July 9, 2008 4:29 PM
ThnLnk ( http://thnlnk.com/ ) keeps track of stats but also creates and allows you to create your own "semantic" URLs. These then create "tags" on the background allowing users to define the semantic value of their links.
It also preserves the authority of links by keeping the domain name in the URL. This way people know where they're clicking such that you know that http://thnlnk.com/metacritic/The.Best.Books.of.2006/998 takes you to Metacritic, and not to some spam service.
ThnLnk also has applications. You want to see movies in your area? Try: http://thnlnk.com/mv/Somerville,MA . Want to get the traffic in Denver? http://thnlnk.com/tr/denver,co
Posted by: Paul | July 9, 2008 6:11 PM
While some website do use URL Shorteners, their biggest growth is due to Microblogging, which only allows 140 or 160 characters. Even most short urls are over 40 character, some can be over 120 characters. You can see the need.
I've been using Snip!Url at http://snipurl.com/ and it offers tracking and a number of services; but Bit.ly exceeds it in offering cached page history (if the link dies), and referrer data (which I often want). But where Snip!Url exceeds Bit.ly, at least for now is that it tracks links via account. I have access to all 130 links, I've recommended w/i last 2 months.
The longevity is good. It allows me to see that people are paying more attention to my links, especially after I started adjusting what I posted based on interest level. For example, I'm into technology, nonprofits, and popular culture. It allowed me to determine my Twitter friends did NOT like my pop culture posts; but switching those links to FaceBook did get them hits.
I'm not certain if 15 hits is enough to notice those types of trends. But 'referrer data' that's cool to see if others are reposting a link or to determine if Twitter, Plurk, FaceBook or some other social network is bringing in more links on a multi-post link.
Posted by: allgood2 | July 14, 2008 12:10 PM
A follow-up. I posted a link to this article via Bit.ly and discovered that Bit.ly seems to consolidate links. Ex. if 5 random people around the world, or just across the US. post a link to the same New York Times' article, Bit.ly counts all hits to the article, not just hits to my link to the article. My link to this article displayed 1238 hits, except, I know my average number of hits for a link in a single day is typically 10-12; via a Twitter post, and then stays static for unpopular links; grows to 20-35 for popular; or zooms to 100+ for wildly popular.
The data that bit.ly provides is great for the linked article, but maybe not so great for the poster, if your trying to measure influence and growth of influence (want to find out if people who follow you are interested in what you say); or if getting specific retweets will zoom traffic, etc.
Still, I like the referrer data, and the thumbnails. If I was measuring hits to an article on my site, I'd want bit.ly; but since my links are to other sites; I really want to measure interest or influence; so looks like Snip!Url wins for me, for now.
Posted by: allgood2 | July 14, 2008 12:49 PM
While I applaud most of what bit.ly is trying to here, I think there's a fundamental flaw in their design, which I've written up on my blog, because it's far longer than would be suitable for a comment.
Posted by: Marty Alchin | July 14, 2008 1:29 PM
Another free shortened URL service yup now we had a lot of choice , thanks for this i will this one to market my affiliate links :)
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