November 2011
1 post
bitly and Verisign
One of our investors brought his teenage daughter by the office the other day. She was puzzled.
“Bitly has an office?” she asked her father. “I thought it was, you know, just part of the Internet.”
We took that as a great compliment — over the last three years, bitly links really have become a ubiquitous part of the web. A recent Microsoft Research report even claims that short links can...
October 2011
1 post
We See into the Future
bitly sees the future!
Not in a time-travel, causality-breaking way, of course. bitly sees the future by knowing what is popular and exciting on the internet before anyone else does.
Scientifically-minded purists will argue that we only know the present. Fair enough. Yet we can see much of the future by understanding the present while others are still catching up with the past.
bitly has been...
September 2011
1 post
4 tags
You just shared a link. How long will people pay...
How long is a link “alive” before people stop caring? Does it matter what kind of content it is, or where you shared it? At bitly we see a lot of links, and while every link is special, we’re learning a few general principles that we can share. Let’s take a look at one particular story - Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens - which was first shared by StylistMagazine on Facebook on Tuesday...
August 2011
3 posts
bitly Has an iOS 5 SDK!
As you may have heard, the forthcoming fifth version of Apple’s iOS has some very cool share-to-Twitter functionality baked directly into the operating system. We have been hard at work on an SDK that will allow iOS applications to automatically use branded bitly short links with this functionality. (For example, news.me shares to Twitter with on.news.me branded links.) Our SDK also supports...
bitly Acquires Twitterfeed
For years now, we’ve worked closely with our friends at Twitterfeed to enhance their social media publishing tools with branded short links and realtime data. Today, we are excited to announce that we have acquired Twitterfeed, and to welcome both Twitterfeed and its users to the bitly family. The publishing workflow provided by Twitterfeed constitutes a core part of the bitly ecosystem. Along...
Some Hacks from the 1.USA.gov Hackathon!
Many thanks to everyone who came out to our 1.USA.gov hackathon! It was great to see so many friendly hackers and open data enthusiasts collaborating and sharing ideas (and devouring 11 pizzas in about as many minutes).
Our friends at USA.gov posted a summary of the hacks created at all four nationwide hackathons, including an awesome visualization of NASA’s popularity worldwide created...
July 2011
5 posts
Our Data Could Be Your Life
Do you know exactly what you were reading 10 years ago this very moment? 10 years from now, you may. The data we create is a living archive of our interests and intentions, and we’re creating more of it every day — a staggering 1.2 zettabytes last year alone. At bitly, we are always looking to learn from our data, and we are thrilled that a particularly interesting set of bitly data is...
Where does your traffic really come from?
Lately there’s been a lot of discussion of the relevance of referrers as a way of discovering the source of traffic to a site. At bitly, we see billions of clicks per month on across multiple platforms, instant messages, emails and mobile text messages. This gives us a unique window onto the way people share social objects, and we see how they propagate through human networks and across the...
Visualizing The NASA Shuttle Launch with Public...
A couple weeks ago, we announced a fantabulous 1.USA.gov open data hack day to be held on Friday July 29th. Since then, our data team has been playing with the clickstream data for the 1.USA.gov project, which has been publicly mirrored on the usa.gov site. Here’s a nifty visualization of click traffic to 1.USA.gov links on July 8th, the day of the last manned NASA space shuttle launch:
...
Log In to bitly With Your Twitter/Facebook...
You can now log in to bitly using your Twitter or Facebook account!
Just head over to bitly.com and select “Sign in with Twitter” or “Sign in with Facebook.” If you already have a bitly account, you’ll be able to link your Twitter/Facebook account for single-click sign-on. If you do not have a bitly account, we’ll make one for you!
If you have any additional...
Finding Truth in bitly Data
We are constantly in awe of the insights that can be drawn from big data. Often what we instinctually believe to be true turns out to be incorrect. A few weeks ago, two members of our data team (Hilary and Brian) made a wager about what time of day sees the most iPad usage. (Brian won.)
A weeks worth of log files and thirty minutes on a Hadoop cluster later, we had our answer. The iPad was...
June 2011
3 posts
1.USA.gov Open Data and Hack Day Friday, July...
Back in March, the USA.gov team announced a partnership with bitly to shorten content hosted on .gov and .mil domains to 1.USA.gov URLs. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be joining USA.gov, Measured Voice and SimpleGeo to host a 1.USA.gov hack day in New York, Washington D.C., San Diego and San Francisco on Friday, July 29th.
Interested hackers will have lots of fun data to...
Break it down! See which links drove your...
You can now use your bitly analytics dashboard to see *which* links contributed to your overall daily and hourly click counts! Just click on the bar corresponding to the number of clicks on a particular day or hour, and we’ll unroll a list of the links that contributed to that number, handily sorted by popularity. For more information about the platforms, referring sites and countries that...
bitly Pro is now... bitly!
Since launching in December of 2009, our bitly Pro whitelabel service has grown to power over 10,000 custom short domains, including but by no means limited to gat.es (The Gates Foundation), diddy.it, (Diddy), dalaila.ma (His Holiness the Dalai Lama), and cart.mn (South Park Studios).
To make our whitelabel service available to as many of our users as possible, we are not only bringing bitly Pro...
May 2011
1 post
new CEO
bitly was started @betaworks almost three years ago, and in that time it has grown from a project into a business. The site is a big site, the API is one of the largest on the web, there are thousands of white label partners using bitly, billions of links created, and billions of clicks on those links every month. About 8 weeks ago we announced the arrival of MRoth from Flickr, now we are...
April 2011
1 post
News.me is available now!
We are very excited to announce that News.me - a new social news reader for the iPad powered by bitly - is now available in the iTunes app store. You can read more about News.me on bitly CEO John Borthwick’s blog here, and you can download the app directly from the iTunes store here. If you do not have an iPad, you can sign up for a daily, personalized bitly-powered email news digest at...
March 2011
2 posts
bitly's Got a Brand New Mobile Site!
Hey look, it’s a desk covered in mobile devices!
What makes these mobile devices different from all other mobile devices? They are all running the brand new cross-platform bitly mobile site, which we are extremely stoked to share with you today. Just pick up your favorite (smart)phone or tablet, navigate over to bit.ly, j.mp or bitly.com, and behold the newness.
What can you do on the...
In Which We Welcome Matthew Rothenberg to the...
The last couple months have been exceptionally busy for us here at bitly. We’ve been rolling out a bunch of new features, and we have a ton more new stuff in the pipeline. (We’ll be showcasing some of the new awesomeness on this very blog.) We are buzzing with small improvements and big ideas, and we look forward to providing you with even more ways to create, share and explore bitly...
February 2011
2 posts
Network Issues Affecting Some Comcast Customers
We are receiving reports that a small number of Comcast customers have been experiencing general Internet connectivity problems. We continue to see normal levels of traffic at bit.ly, and our systems continue to function normally. You can always stay up to date on the status of our service by visiting our public status page at http://status.bit.ly. We will keep you posted as we hear more about...
Jimmy Fallon Introduces Rap Crew Odd Future with a...
As reported by Mashable, Jimmy Fallon introduced rap crew Odd Future’s epic Wednesday night performance with an LP-sized QR code in hand. Odd Future’s record label XL Recordings used bitly’s automatic QR code generation to set up this code, which redirects to Odd Future’s website when scanned by a mobile device.
As always, you can track any bit.ly link by appending a +...
January 2011
1 post
The hack.a.bit Hackathon Goes Bicoastal for...
We have teamed up with our friends at Klout to host the first bicoastal hack.a.bit hackathon on Wednesday, February 2nd at 6pm ET/3pm PT, aka Groundhacks Day!
The event will take place at both bit.ly HQ in New York (the site of all previous hack.a.bit hackathons) and Klout’s fabulous new space in San Francisco, and we will be converging on the interwebs via Skype and the hackabit party...
December 2010
2 posts
Stop! Collaborate and Bundle.
Happy holidays from bit.ly! As you may have noticed, we’re celebrating the season with some some festive winter decorations.
We are also celebrating the tens of thousands of bit.ly bundles that our users have created since we launched this feature one month ago today. The Guardian made a bundle of worldwide Wikileaks coverage, NASA made a bundle of Falcon 9 Rocket photos, ThinkGeek made a...
Announcing The Winners Of The bit.ly API Contest!
…. aaaand so ends the second bit.ly API Contest! Once again, we were floored by the range and depth of the submissions we received. Thanks to everyone who submitted, and special thanks to everyone who came to one of our hackabit hackathons and/or gave us feedback about our API. Without further ado….
1st Prize (MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer): * bit.ly news (http://bit.ly/fvM96H) -...
November 2010
3 posts
Meet The Bundles!
Since we launched bit.ly Bundles on Monday evening, our users have created over 14,000 bundles of bit.ly links! We’ve seen bundles of recipes, bundles of Complexity Dilberts, bundles of news, bundles of design, bundles of music, bundles of photos, bundles of fonts, bundles of domain name registrars, bundles of BBC, bundles of bundles, and bundles more. We’ll be sharing some of our...
Introducing bit.ly Bundles!
We are thrilled to announce the launch of bit.ly bundles, a new way of sharing multiple links with a single bit.ly short URL.
You can start bundling links right away! Just head over to bit.ly, shorten some links and then hit the “Bundle” button.
Every link you add to a bundle will include a rich media preview (courtesy of our friends at embed.ly) and a bit.ly click count,...
The bit.ly API Contest Ends in Two Weeks!
In two weeks’ time, our pufferfish overlords will begin selecting the winners of our fabulous API contest. You have until midnight on Wednesday, November 17th to read up on our API, build something awesome, and tell us about it at contest@bit.ly. If you are in the New York area, you can swing by our hackabit hackathon to wrap up your project and behold the grand-prize MakerBot...
October 2010
2 posts
It's a bit.ly API Contest!
When we held our last API contest back in January of 2009, we were thoroughly impressed by the clever, inventive and generally rad submissions we received. Since then, we’ve added loads of new features and endpoints to our API, including some user-level OAuth endpoints we wrote about here.
Sooooooooo… we’ll be officially kicking off another bit.ly API contest at the next...
bit.ly Series B
We are excited to announce that bit.ly has completed Series B funding. The Series B was led by RRE Ventures, and General Partner Eric Wiesen will be joining the bit.ly board. It’s been an amazing two and a half years since the founding of bit.ly. In 2008, bit.ly emerged as the dominant platform for shortening links in the social web. In 2009, bit.ly grew like crazy and started offering more...
Trending Links API, OAuth 2 Support
We are pleased to announce some new user-level metrics features in our API, making it even easier for developers to provide bit.ly users with realtime feedback about their trending bit.ly links.
We are currently using the new /v3/user/realtime_links API endpoint in our Chrome Extension to notify bit.ly users about their “Trending Bits.” This feature provides a popup notification...
September 2010
3 posts
The hack.a.bit Hackathon Returns This Wednesday
This Wednesday September 15th at 6pm, we will open the doors to our New York office for our third monthly hackabit hackathon! Our first two hackathons spawned lines upon lines of JavaScript, Python, C, Haskell, R, and many other delightful languages. A Wikileaks data visualization project from last month’s hackabit ii even got a shout-out in the New York Times bits blog.
This...
bit.ly and Link Wrapping
Following this week’s OAuth and apps announcements, some of our users have inquired about how bit.ly will work with Twitter’s new link-wrapping service. Link-wrapping will enable Twitter to collect traffic data and block spam, but it will not interfere with bit.ly analytics, bit.ly Pro custom domains, or bit.ly Enterprise usage — you will be able to shorten, share and track links with bit.ly...
August 2010
3 posts
Introducing @clickabit
bit.ly has a lot of data, and we are always learning interesting and unexpected things from it. For example: approximately .05% of URLs shared through bit.ly include content about cheeseburgers. (An inclusive search for cheeseburgers and “cheezburgers” raises this figure to .07%.) By contrast, roughly .01% of URLs shared through bit.ly include content about automobiles.
We’re currently hard at...
More Tips for Using bit.ly with Publishing Tools
As promised, we have put together some additional tips for using bit.ly with a number of popular cut-and-paste sharing buttons and widgets including the Twitter Tweet Button.
Please visit our guide to Third-Party Tools For Publishers. This page includes working examples and code snippets for the most popular sharing tools.
For smaller publishers who cannot cache links on their backend, we are...
Using bit.ly with Twitter’s Tweet Button
This afternoon, Twitter added its “Tweet Button” to the ranks of online content-sharing tools. Tech Crunch has been using the Tweet Button to share links with its custom bit.ly short domain tcrn.ch, and we wanted to pass along some tips for using bit.ly and the Tweet Button together.
Publishers can use their bit.ly short URLs with the Tweet Button the same way they have done with...
July 2010
2 posts
Dashboard 2.0
This week, along with design updates to the bit.ly Pro site, we’re rolling out a brand-new analytics dashboard for our enterprise customers.
The new enterprise dashboard lets publishers, marketers, e-commerce sites and personalities benchmark their social media efforts — the number of clicks they’ve driven to particular stories, products or promotions — against overall organic...
Celebrate 2 Years of bit.ly at our hack.a.bit...
Today, bit.ly celebrates two years of shortening, sharing and tracking URLs. And since two years is the pizza and energy drinks anniversary, we are marking the occasion with a HACKATHON. Get ready to write code, eat pizza, drink caffeinated beverages, make friends, share ideas, and (maybe) fall in love all over again.
What exactly is a hackathon? Here’s how it works: just bring your...
June 2010
1 post
Welcome to bit.ly Pro
Today we’re excited to welcome a long list of new partners to bit.ly Pro.
Thousands of brands and bloggers are now up and running on the service. Yahoo, MySpace, The Huffington Post, Politico, Pepsi, NPR, Scribd, Toys”R”Us, CSPAN, Dailymotion, IMDB, the New York Times, Bravo, Mozilla and Amazon are just a few of the great brands that have joined in the last few months. Search...
May 2010
1 post
Introducing bit.ly, fugu edition
Today we’re rolling out a new release of the bit.ly website, designed to help you more easily shorten, share, and track your links. The interface has been redesigned from the ground up to be easier to use, faster to load, and provide brand new features. The new release (which we’ve been affectionately calling fugu) provides enhanced features for searching through your links, more...
April 2010
1 post
bit.ly 1.3
We are on our way to Chirp and we are excited to meet many new and emerging companies and discuss bit.ly and the bit.ly API. Since the day we founded bit.ly, we’ve aimed to provide a simple service that does a few things very well — we believe the world of social distribution is offering a myriad of new ways that users, publishers and commerce providers can share and track content. bit.ly...
March 2010
2 posts
Introducing bit.ly API Version 3
At bit.ly we’ve been working hard to improve the speed and reliability of our API endpoints, provide simpler, more consistent response formats, and clarify our API documentation. This V3 release goes a long way towards accomplishing those goals. All V3 methods support identical JSON and XML response formats. JSONP is likewise universally supported, and many methods support an additional...
shortening issues
We’re currently experiencing some elevated error rates and increased shorten times when shortening URLs. We are investigating the problem, and will update the blog as we learn more. Clicks on existing bit.ly links should continue to function normally.
Update:
API responses should now be returning within an appropriate amount of time. A few high volume users who were rate limited should...
February 2010
1 post
bitly.Pro Beta Update
We’ve had an incredible response to the bitly.Pro beta launch last Friday. We especially want to thank the hundreds of users who launched their custom shorteners and dashboards this weekend. We welcome your continued feedback and enjoy seeing your custom domain URLs “in the wild.” If you’ve found some creative use cases for the service, by all means, please leave us a...
January 2010
1 post
bit.ly Pro: Open Beta and Enterprise Service
Since we announced the bit.ly Pro service last month, we’ve been racing to keep up with the demand — thousands of companies and bloggers have already signed up, and we are getting new requests every day. To help everyone get up and running as soon as possible, we’ve decided to move to an open beta: we’re going to launch a self-service website next week. Publishers will be...
December 2009
2 posts
bit.ly Pro, bit.ly Labs, and bitly.tv
Bit.ly Pro is off to a good start. We launched on Monday night and over 1,000 publishers and bloggers had contacted us by Tuesday asking to sign up. Our new Pro point person, Greg Battle — you can reach him at bit.ly/bitlypro — is frenetically provisioning partners. Recent additions include Defenders of Wildlife, gdgt, icanhascheezburger, Mashable, MTV Networks, Ning, Chris Sacca,...
Announcing bit.ly Pro
Today we’re pleased to announce a new service: bit.ly Pro. The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites.
As part of our initial beta program, we’re making custom URLs available to a limited number of large and medium-sized Web publishers and bloggers, including...
November 2009
4 posts
Spam and Malware Protection
Spam sucks. That’s why we’ll be integrating three new services over the next few weeks, to extend the current spam and malware protection we offer to our users.
The first is VeriSign’s iDefense IP reputation service. The iDefense system is focused on detecting and defeating malware. The iDefense blacklist includes URLs, domains, and IP addresses which host exploits, malicious code, command and...
Bloated Bits
Earlier today, some bit.ly users may have experienced occasional performance issues and errors when shortening their URLs. We’ve determined the cause and remedied the issue (in fact, we took the opportunity to make some optimizations).
At this time, all systems are working properly, and we don’t anticipate a recurrence of the situation.
Summary Bit.ly Stats
For a long time, our users have been requesting summarized views of their click data. Today, we have taken the first in a series of steps to expose a summary of data across all of your Bit.ly links.
At the top of your Bit.ly history, you’ll see a small chart displaying your overallday by day click traffic for the last week, along with a click total and a link to your summary stats page...
Announcing The Launch of 301 Works
Big news for little URLs today, as the Internet Archive announced that they will be taking the lead on 301works.org, an effort designed to add permanence and reliability to the operation of URL shorteners.
From the release:
The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will enable...
October 2009
1 post
History Upgrades and File Uploads
Some users may have noticed that yesterday we rolled out some upgrades to the bit.ly history system. In addition to being significantly faster, it allows for some additional features we think you’ll enjoy. One of the first things you may notice is the addition of an edit button next to titles in your history display. This allows you to personalize the title for any link you’ve...