Bit.ly Plug-in Extends Tiny URLs, Shows Clickthrough Numbers
Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.
Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.
We profiled Bit.ly when it launched in July and recommended using it for URL shortening because it makes use of all the valuable data that other URL shorteners leave unused.
The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening services' APIs to get traffic data and some of them don't update very frequently. There's also a lot of phantom clicks showing up; the company believes they've found a 3rd party app that's partially loading the destination pages and inflating the numbers, but we'll see if they can do anything about it. For now this data is better for determining the relative popularity of a shortened link than it is for literal numbers.
Twitter users will like the extension because hovering over any username there makes the user's information pop-up. That works quite well and is very useful. It's a fast way to see who someone is talking to in a conversation on Twitter.
The moral of the story here is that in little things like URL shortening, there's a whole lot of valuable information and room for innovation. We're glad that Bit.ly is moving to take advantage of that and we look forward to seeing what still other people will do with the data once it's stockpiled and made available by Bit.ly for further development.
You can get the Bit.ly extension for Firefox here.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Very interesting new bit.ly plugins... http://bit.ly/8GFd
Posted by: Clay Newton
|
January 7, 2009 11:02 AM
Having just installed this, I'm being asked for my Twitter username and password via a HTTP authentication modal dialog box labelled "Twitter API". Is this usual? Or just some sort of freakish coincidence? After the events of the weekend I'm a bit wary of this sort of thing.
That looks damned handy, especially to know where an alias url is going before you click. Would also be nice to extract a real URL from a proxified one (ahem, like on RWW) as when I am tagging from my RSS reader, I prefer to tag the real URL.
I also like http://tr.im because you can create an account and it provides you click through data for all the URLs you have shrunk.
re: Alan
"Having just installed this, I'm being asked for my Twitter username and password via a HTTP authentication modal dialog box labelled "Twitter API". Is this usual? Or just some sort of freakish coincidence? After the events of the weekend I'm a bit wary of this sort of thing."
This is the normal response from the Twitter Javascript API when trying to view data about a Twitter user who protects their updates. Here's what's happening:
You mouseover someone's name that protects her updates. We call Twitter javascript API to find her Bio, URL, photo, etc.
If she has not granted you access to see info about her on Twitter, Twitter prompts you for a password with that box.
Just hit cancel on that box, because even if you enter your Twitter credentials you won't be able to see her info unless she has granted you access to follow her.
Very handy, thanks for the heads up!
Man I love Bit.ly!!! They just keep reinventing what used to be a damn boring space. Bit.ly FTW!!
I wish Ping.fm would implement click-counts too!
I wonder if this bit.ly extension counts ping.fm - they do count a whole lot of other services. i've got a list in email
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
|
January 7, 2009 2:15 PM
Do you promise that this add-on has a log of promise?
Meh. Why do I always choose the wrong provider when it comes to new web services? I'm a committed user of tr.im. But this is a feature I'd definitely want, so not I have to abandon all my tr.im data and start fresh on bit.ly.
Well being one of the founders of http://short.ie I have to do the shameless-plug thing :)
We basically decided to launch short.ie in august because none of the other URL shorteners didn't have what we wanted. We are making a social network around urls (fetch content, recommending urls to our users, public user stats, twitter integration (post to twitter from your profile and all) and I was actually to see bit.ly coming alive as this is definitely "the second" best URL shortening service :)
Seriously now, this addon to firefox is really cool! Well done bit.ly team :)
As bit.ly has improved, I've used is.gd and other services less and less. I enjoy having a record of my links, usually shortened for Twitter. I'd love to see the ability to search by content in the linked page itself. Or at least more of the tagging features available in Delicious.
There are around 200 URL shortener services (tinyurl-like)
Get the list here : http://www.logiste.be/blog/155-raccourcisseurs-durl-tinyurl-like/
Some offer great functionnalities like last-click date, groups, privacy, auto-destruction features, aso...
very cool.
Thanks for the post.
I'm having lots of fun with this bit.ly extension. Thanks for the tip.
For any of the commenters that have a URL service they either run or use, if the plugin is not currently showing previews for URLs for a domain, hit @bitly with a message on twitter requesting us to add support for it and we'll make it happen.
Can we please stop using URL shorteners for links outside of Twitter?
I understand URL shorteners when limited to 140 characters, but this is not necessary on most of the web. It just obfuscates the ultimate destination, so I tend to ignore them outside of Twitter (seems shady).
This FF Extension has a very, very nasty bug - it will write:
script src="http://s.bit.ly/bitlypreview.js" /script [brackets removed to prevent it being js.]
to the body field of a WordPress blog you are writing or editing and this will cause IE to refuse to render the page!
Here's a movie of this bug in action:
http://screencast.com/t/Zn7jGEzBO
Details: http://www.47hats.com/?p=954
Cheers,
Bob Walsh
Be careful -- I just noticed that this plug-in was automatically inserting a corrupt script at the bottom of posts I was making (in Wordpress 2.7 on Firefox 3.0.5)
This would render an error message upon going to a single-page or single post on IE7 browser (twitpic available here: http://twitter.com/netZoo/status/1108339831)
That said, this should be an easy bug for the developers to fix, but if you blog using Wordpress 2.7, you may want to do a search for a script containing the thread: s.bit.ly/bitlypreview.js and remove it.
Posted by: sternberg.myopenid.com
|
January 9, 2009 7:20 PM
The bit.ly team has updated the plug-in to fix the Wordpress 2.7 bug I mentioned in the previous comment (Disclaimer: I haven't had a chance to play with it yet)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10297
Posted by: sternberg.myopenid.com
|
January 12, 2009 11:45 AM