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 customers to track content around any subject or phrase across the entire social web – not just Twitter and Facebook.
This technology is providing access to a new view of the web. The web is no longer just a list of linked pages, but a web of fresh, social and viral content that’s weighted and ranked in real-time, and, in many cases, before Google applies its own PageRank to it. → 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 trend through user search.
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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 to Facebook. He’s more a New York kind of guy. Back in the 1990s, he founded Datek, one of the original online brokerages. → 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 ailing under Yahoo. → 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 Albano, we’ve now learned that j.mp links can now again be posted to Facebook walls worldwide. → 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.”
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 site on-stage at SAI’s Ignition conference as an example of somebody using bit.ly’s APIs). With billions of shared bit.ly links every month, there is a pretty broad reach of links to mine.
Bitly News is modeled on Hacker News, the headline news site for developers. The site only shows headlines and where they come from in rank order. Each headline links directly to the original story. Under each headline you can see how many times it’s been clicked on and when it was posted. You can comment on Bitly News or click through to bit.ly to see more stats for that headline. → 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 bit.ly link. Don’t pretend like this isn’t your dream come true.
The company created the Xtranormal promo video above, which features a tech nerd who is really excited about the bundles trying to explain what they are to a cute girl: → 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 opened up their goo.gl product to more directly compete with Bit.ly. But it looks like Facebook, which runs fb.me, has sort of gone the other way. They’re actually now working with Bit.ly. → 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 same time.
Yes, just like with goo.gl, now you can add “.qr” to the end of any bit.ly link (including custom ones, like our own tcrn.ch) and you’ll be taken to a page with a QR code for that link. But look closely. Below the QR code, the Bit.ly fish is about to eat something — some colorful balls. You know, the same colorful balls associated with Google. → 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 day, more than 200 million bit.ly short links are clicked on and decoded by the link-shortening service. Bit.ly keeps growing despite no longer being the default link shortener for Twitter. In September, nearly 6 billion bit.ly links were clicked (or decoded), up from 3.4 billion six months earlier. Twitter now only represents about a third of bit.ly’s links, down from about 60 percent last December when it stopped being the default link shortener for Twitter. Facebook, MySpace, and new services such as Formspring are more than picking up the slack. → 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 interesting data we’re playing with. In the meantime, we’d like to introduce @clickabit,” Bit.ly writes in the post. They key part is obviously the first half. We’ve known for a while that Bit.ly has been planning some sort of service to expose the best links being shared across the web — kind of like Tweetmeme or Digg. But Bit.ly links are shared on email and Facebook too; it would be about more than Twitter. → 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 changes that.
The new Tweet Button, which was officially unveiled by Twitter earlier today (and is already up and running on TechCrunch), by default wraps all links in Twitter’s own t.co URL shortener. But this shortening is only for the pop-up tweet box and so Twitter can make sure the URL isn’t a malicious one. When it is sent out to your tweet stream, you’ll now see the actual URL (though abbreviated). → 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 strategies are working best.
Of course, there’s more than one way to measure success, which is why the dashboard allows publishers to analyze the popularity of their articles both by the number of times their links are clicked (page hits, in other words) and how their links are being shared. For example, TechCrunch could use this to visualize how many clicks were generated by a tweeted story from our official account versus how many were from links users took the initiative to share themselves. The higher the latter statistic, the more viral a story was. → 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 recommendation.
Twitter developer Raffi Krikorian notes as much in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group today. Specifically, he writes, “we want to be able to build services and APIs that can make algorithmic recommendations to users based on the content they are consuming.” This will be possible because Twitter will be keeping track of all clicks (as they note, “in aggregate and not identifiable manner”). → 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, MySpace, The Huffington Post, Politico, Pepsi, NPR, Scribd, Toys”R”Us, CSPAN, Dailymotion, IMDB, the New York Times, Bravo, Mozilla and Amazon have all joined in recent months. We started using the service shortly after it launched in December — those tcrn.ch you see all run through Bit.ly Pro. → 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
