Gnip has found itself a sweet spot in partnering with startups who make data available via APIs. The company currently has access to Twitter and Tumblr’s firehoses, and has announced today that it will be making the publicly available data of Reddit, Instagram, bitly, Stack Overflow, Panoramio and Plurk available to its customers who rely on Gnip to do social reporting. Additionally… → Read More
In a statement on its blog today, Bitly has announced that CEO Peter Stern has stepped down as CEO. The reason is that Stern is to “pursue other interests”; further details aren’t known at this time. The NYC-based company has raised $28.5 close to $23 million to date, with the last round being a monster $15 million one by O’Reilly, RRE and Khosla last July. Stern was the… → Read More
Bitly has launched a set of social APIs that includes real-time search, attention spikes and metadata about URLs.
The new APIs offer the following: → Read More
Today Bitly announced a new Bitly Labs project called Realtime, a service for finding the most clicked on Bitly links. Realtime, now in private beta, allows users to filter searches by social network, keyword, subject and more. For example, here are the results for a search for the keyword “startups” in technology on Twitter: → Read More
Link shortener Bitly today launched a major redesign and number of new features that all add up to what the company itself calls “a new bitly.” Among these new features are ‘bitmarks,’ bitly’s name for its new bookmarking features, the ability to search and find these bookmarks, a fast search functionality, as well as enhanced public profiles that give users more privacy control. Bitly is also… → Read More
Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly is today announcing the launch of Bitly Enterprise 2.0, a new version of its enterprise-friendly dashboard. The Bitly Enterprise platform, which helps businesses with multiple social media accounts monitor the impacts of their content’s distribution, will now include the first production release of the company’s brand-new search technology, allowing… → Read More
Link shortening service Bit.ly just announced the launch of its beta search platform and “reputation monitoring” service for its paying Enterprise customers.
Apparently Bit.ly has been crawling every URL its shorten for “virality” (I guess that’s what they were doing all this time) in an attempt to provide a snapshot of content that’s trending and interestingly enough content that’s going to… → Read More
Three years after founding bitly as a home-grown startup inside betaworks, John Borthwick is passing the reigns to a new CEO, Peter Stern. Borthwick will remain CEO of betaworks and concentrate on new products and investments.
Stern comes most recently from Zenbe, a webmail platform and mobile that went through a Facebook talent acquisition last November. Stern, who was a co-founder, didn’t go… → Read More
Flickr’s recently departed product chief Matthew Rothenberg is landing in a new job in New York City. He was just hired by bitly to become its new VP of Product. He will be moving from California. Score another one for the New York startup scene.
Rothenberg’s decision to leave Flickr, which he says has more to do with personal reasons, is nevertheless seen as yet another sign that Flickr is… → Read More
As we reported yesterday, Facebook for a while blocked all j.mp short URLs provided by parent company bit.ly in status and page updates.
Asked for more information, Facebook said it was working with bit.ly to resolve the issue, and that more than 70% of j.mp links pointed to spam or “other security issues” at the time the block was imposed.
Thanks to our original tipster on the story, William… → Read More
William Albano checks in to tell us that Facebook is blocking all j.mp links in status and page updates (but not profiles). Sure enough, I tried to post a j.mp link in a status update just now, and I got an error notice saying:
“This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.” → Read More
What are the headlines people are sharing the most? A new headline aggregation site called Bitly News tries to answer that by showing the most clicked-on shortened bit.ly links on Twitter. Bitly News is not an official bit.ly product. It is an independent hack by Jeff Miller built on top of both the bit.ly and Twitter APIs. (John Borthwick, CEO of both bit.ly and betaworks, just mentioned the… → Read More
There is a simple rule on the Internet when it comes to passing links around: the easier it is to share links, the more links will be shared. Bit.ly and other URL shorteners proved this with their billions of links repackaged for a 140-character world. Later today or tomorrow, bit.ly will be introducing a new feature called bit,ly bundles which lets you shorten a bunch of links into one single… → Read More
Remember several months ago when both Google and Facebook decided to get into the URL shortening game? We wondered if Bit.ly, the market leader, was fu.kd? And we were hardly alone.
But nearly a year later, it seems like they’re doing more than fine as neither Facebook nor Google seemed to take their shortener too seriously for much of that time. It was only just about a month ago that Google… → Read More
Back in April, Google added a very nifty feature to their URL shortener, goo.gl. If you simply add “.qr” to any shortened URL, you will be taken to a page with a QR code for that URL. If you scan that image with a QR code reader, it will take you to the link that was originally shortened. It’s a feature that’s so cool, Bit.ly decided to do the same thing — while taking a shot at Google at the… → Read More
It looks like short links are here to stay, at least for a while longer. Bit.ly, the largest independent link shortening service out there, closed a $9 million Series B financing. The round was led by RRE Ventures, with AOL Ventures also becoming a new investor. Existing investors betaworks, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, SV Angel, Founders Fund, and a few angels participated as well.
Every… → Read More
Today on their blog, URL shortening service Bit.ly unveiled a cute new feature: Clickabit. It’s a Twitter account that surfaces some of the “surprising and bizarre” links being shortened and shared across their network. But the feature also hints at something we’ve been talking about for a while: Bit.ly Now.
“We’re currently hard at work on several systems that will expose some of the… → Read More
The link shortening revolution that has taken place the past few years has been interesting for a number of reasons. But one of the most interesting aspects is that we’re all now trained to click on a URL even if we have no idea what it actually is. Sure, you may be visiting TechCrunch.com, but in Twitter’s stream, it has been hidden as http://bit.ly/lkowieofi or the like. Twitter Tweet Button… → Read More
Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly is giving its enterprise customers a new analytics dashboard today, allowing large publishers to better track the distribution of their links on a per-story basis. The benefits of the new dashboard are obvious — publishers and companies with large presences on Twitter and Facebook can use the dashboard to see which of their articles and social media… → Read More
Today, Twitter has expanded the testing of its own URL shortner — which is now using the t.co domain. The expansion (which will eventually be available to all Twitter users) is interesting in terms of what it means for the URL shortening ecosystem. But it also should be interesting from a broader perspective to the entire ecosystem because it opens up some new possibilities, such as content… → Read More
There are over 150 million clicks on Bit.ly links each day. The amount of data running through the service is massive, and continuing to grow at an incredible pace. But we’ve known that for a while. Just as impressive may be what Bit.ly is doing with its premium service, Bit.ly Pro.
Today, the service is announcing some of the huge names across the web have signed up to use Bit.ly Pro. Yahoo… → Read More
I’m not saying there’s necessarily something nefarious going on here, but judge for yourself.
In their source code, Bit.ly has the word “awesome” as one of their meta keywords. This may just seem like some kooky programmer having some fun — until you remember that one of their main rivals is a another URL shortening service called Awe.sm. → Read More
Today during Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Hilary Mason, Bit.ly’s lead data scientist took the stage and offered up some interesting data about the service. Her focus was what our data usage says about the realtime web.
Below, I’ll paste all the slides, but here are some of the key data points she gave: → Read More
Yesterday we showed a teaser of our conversation with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme. Here’s the full video, in two parts.
This is a debate around the recent decision by Twitter to compete directly with third party developers who are making Twitter applications that Twitter has deemed to be mere “hole fillers.” A variety of third party apps are now competing directly with… → Read More
On Wednesday at Twitter’s Chirp conference, CEO Evan Williams released another bomb during the wrap-up Q&A session: Twitter is working on creating it’s own link shortener for Twitter.com. Once again, in the space of a week, Twitter declared it was moving into an area previously occupied by another company in the Twitter eco-system, in this case bit.ly, which grew on the back of Twitter when… → Read More
Another hole is about to be filled in Twitter’s product features. CEO Evan Williams just confirmed plans to launch its own link shortener on stage during the final Q&A session at Chirp. HE noted that it would be “stupid” not to add native link-shortening capabilities into Twitter, since most Twitter clients already have that feature. “We want to solve that problem,” he said. “Everyone else… → Read More
The default link shortener on Twitter, bit.ly, just keeps getting bigger. In March, 3.4 billion bit.ly-shortened links were clicked on, up from 2.7 billion in February and only 87 million a year ago. Yesterday was a record day for bit.ly, with 147 million clicks (see chart).
Even though Twitter still dominates, more than half of all bit.ly links are encoded somewhere besides Twitter.com. Of… → Read More
It’s hard to imagine a Web sans URL shortening services nowadays but you can rest assured that they’re here to stay – for better or worse. Question is: how do the likes of bit.ly, TinyURL and Goo.gl score in terms of speed and availability? That’s exactly what Dutch startup WatchMouse sought to find out. → Read More
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