The company's Twitter statistics (as with all URL shortening services) are used to determine and aggregate Twitter trends by Tweetmeme; however, as of today, according to the company these statistics "can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward." Tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.

And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

How to Get It

If you want to see the DiggBar in action, all you have to do is enter "digg.com/" in front of any URL, and the toolbar will automatically appear at the top of the page. Or, you can use our own DiggBar bookmarklet. Instructions for setting it up are at the end of this post.

More Features

The toolbar also features a prominent 'Random' button, that will, as the name implies, take you to a random page with a similar story that was popular on Digg in the last few days. This, of course, is very similar to what StumbleUpon does.

All of this, of course, will help to make Digg an even stickier site, as users will never quite leave the Digg experience behind, but at the same time, as MG Siegler points out on VentureBeat, this also shifts Digg's focus away from its own site, and turns Digg into a service.

No DiggBar Bookmarklet? No Problem - We Have One For You!

Sadly, Digg didn't provide users with a bookmarklet that would make it easy to quickly invoke the DiggBar without having to edit the URL, but our own Rick Turoczy just wrote up a bookmarklet for us - you just have to drag and drop this link to your bookmarks: digg bar.

After that, clicking on the link will invoke the DiggBar for any site you are currently visiting.

TinyURL has also allowed incomprehensible amounts of value, both in terms of technology and in terms of money, to sit on the table unclaimed. For years. Now a group of some of the web's hottest investors are betting a few million dollars that a smart TinyURL competitor called Bit.ly can take advantage of being the conduit through which millions of people visit sites of interest to them.

We reviewed Bit.ly when the project launched last July and urged readers to use this service to shorten their long links instead of other services like TinyURL. Why do we care what service people use? Because we're fans of innovation and Bit.ly is aiming to be a platform for innovation like TinyURL should have been. If web 2.0 is about democratizing publishing, the next step is machine leveraging all the resulting data.

The Bit.ly Magic

What does Bit.ly do that's so special? They use all the data they see and make it available to third party developers who want to build on top of it. They keep track of the clickthrough numbers and can tell you what the hottest links on the web are at any time. See this @bitlynow Twitter account for one display of that information. Bit.ly says it resolved 20 million distinct URLs last week. That's the beginning of a really large database.

Bit.ly also uses Reuters Calais to extract semantic terms out of the pages that shortcuts are created to. That's valuable information. Want to see the most popular web pages that talk about Dancing With The Stars, or the Federal Stimulus Package, or some other topic, in the last 30 minutes? Somebody wants to, you'd better believe, and that's the kind of real-time information that the Bit.ly API aims to make available. (Disclosure: Calais is an RWW sponsor.)

We've had some concerns about the clickthrough numbers that Bit.ly has reported but the company says they are going through a list of reporting sources that give them problems and eliminating them one at a time. The company says it is now reporting real-time traffic stats that are within 10% of what Google Analytics reports much later. We've been watching the numbers improve in accuracy when it comes to our numbers and can confirm that they are getting much better.

A number of people have looked at today's news and thought it was ridiculous that a link shortening business could raise $2 million in funding. We don't think it's ridiculous at all. Show us a service that can report in real time how many people are visiting millions of pages around the web and what those pages are about, that exposes that data in an API, and we'll show you a platform we're very excited to see work.

Besides the basic chat function, TinyChat also features the ability to add a badge with your chatroom status to your blog or social networking profile. You can also save a copy of your chat log by saving it as a text file, or by forwarding it to your email account.

Hidden Features: Choose Your Own URL and Private Chat

If you don't want to use TinyChat's cryptic names for your chatroom, you can also choose your own by just appending it to the TinyChat URL. If you want to send a private message, just click on the person's name and your message will be invisible to the rest of the room.

The chatroom concept does feel a bit retro, and it would be nice if you could receive some kind of audio or visual notification whenever a new message was posted to your room, but overall, the service just does what it say it does, and it does it well.

iPhone and Flash Coming Soon

Dan Blake, TinyChat's developer, tell us that they are also currently working on a simple iPhone app and a flash widget. If you like TinyChat, you should also check out TinyPaste (short URLs for long quotes) and iOJ (file uploading and sharing app) from the same developers.

In tests, the reason that the TinyURLs were able to be used in this way is because the pages they masked were not at the domain level, but were rather sub-pages of a domain marked as "safe." This actually points to a weakness in the Safe Browsing feature and not really a security risk in the TinyURL service in and of itself. Because Safe Browsing only ranks sites at the domain level, infected sub-pages will always be ranked as "non-malicious" as long as the domain is categorized as "safe."

TinyURL isn't the only service being abused in this way. Other URL-shortening services mentioned in the article include bit.ly, w3t.org and is.gd. However, during their research, the firm also found bit.ly being used by the same cybercriminals. Both TinyURL and bit.ly were notified and the malicious links were removed.

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.

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.

What makes Krunchd special is how many URLs it allows you to shorten at once. You see, with Krunchd, you're not just shortening one URL, you're crunching (pun intended) an entire list of URLs into one short URL. It's a concept similar to Agglom. Only instead of using browser tabs, it brings the recipient to a list of URLs you'd like to share.

Example? Let's say I want to share the Twitter accounts for the RWW writers. Usually, I'd have to send a bunch of separate links, but with Krunchd, it just takes this one URL.

Granted, this isn't technological rocket surgery, but conceptually, it's an interesting take on the problem of sharing URLs with your peers. What's more, it's taking into consideration the way many of us share URLs today. We're not always sharing multiple resources, but when we are, this approach makes a great deal of sense.

As an added bonus - given that the service is new - early users also gain the benefit of getting a really short URL. The service is currently auto-generating URLs that only add 2 additional characters to the Krunchd URL.

While the idea is thoughtful, there is one obvious drawback to Krunchd. And it's something that will likely prevent me from using it: they require you to provide an email address to use the service. There is no privacy policy posted, so I've no idea what they're doing with this information. Even more importantly, I've no idea why they think they need it.

That said, the next time you have a bunch of URLs that you have to share, it may be worth giving Krunchd a try - if the email address thing doesn't bug you.

[UPDATE] Krunchd has removed the email requirement, indicating that it is only necessary if you're interested in modifying your list of URLs in the future. They have also added a privacy statement.

People should stop using TinyURL! In the following post we'll list a few reasons why this is important and point you towards some of the best alternative link shorteners.

Some people argue that URL shorteners are inherently bad. They obfuscate links, the put people at risk of malware or RickRolling and they are unprofessional. Be all that as it may, URL shorteners are so useful that they are here to stay.

TinyURL has huge mindshare and credibility because it's been around for a long time, is widely used and its name clearly says what it does. It's very useful to share shortened links with people by email, IM, Twitter etc. but both users and system administrators are sometimes less willing to trust an obscure URL shortener they haven't heard of before.

If you use TinyURL, you run the risk of your links being broken, for several days out of almost every month. How on earth is this acceptable to people? Perhaps other people don't use URL shorteners for anything important, but we do, and we expect the links we share with people to work.

Alternatives

There's a nearly infinite list of alternatives to TinyURL, but here are three of our favorites.

Bit.ly is a new URL shortener with some awesome semantic web and geolocation data APIs on the back end. Using it will make the world a better place. Bit.ly also offers users all kinds of statistics.

We use Bit.ly with the wonderful Firefox extension URLBarExt, though that does add a few steps that aren't really necessary. Once you've got it set up it's super easy to use.

SnipURL offers many of the same stats that Bit.ly does but is friendlier to use. It doesn't have the semantic magic on the back end but it is more immediately social.

Cli.gs has analytics and a new "geotargeting" feature, as you can see demonstrated in the video below.

There Are Countless Alternatives to TinyURL

TinyURL obviously isn't too concerned about their uptime or else the problem wouldn't continue every single month. There are smarter alternatives all over the web and spreading the love around can't help but decrease load problems.

There are a number of "roll your own URL shortener" options and that is pretty classy - but for most of us just getting to know some alternatives would be a very good idea.

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.

What Bit.ly Does Today

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.)

The Future of Bit.ly: Semantic and Geo Spatial Analysis

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.