'Net Features : bit.ly

New-look Bit.ly Adds Curation Features

Michael Garrity — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly has undergone a redesign that includes the release of a handful of new features heavily focused on curation.

One of these new options is the inclusion of a bookmarking feature called “bitmarks.” With bitmarks, users will be able to save and review the links they’ve shared on Facebook and Twitter, as well as organize them into bundles.

This is essentially a feature the company launched back in 2010, but organizing these bundles is now more collaborative. Any of these bundles can be made private or public. There is now also a network view that allows users to see the links their friends are sharing publicly on Facebook and Twitter.

Other features include the ability to search and find these bookmarks, fast search functionality and enhanced public profiles that offer greater privacy controls for users. There will also be new bookmarklets, an extension for the Chrome browser and Bit.ly’s first-ever iPhone application. These will allow users to save and share links from virtually anywhere.

Developers can immediately start using Bit.ly’s open API to add bitmarking functionality to their apps.

Bit.ly Launches Real-Time Social Search Beta

Michael Garrity — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:30:00 GMT

In an effort to continue to expand its role on the Web, popular link shortening service Bit.ly just launched a new beta search platform and "reputation monitoring service."

The company will be using information gathered over time by crawling every URL that it has shortened to check each one's potential to go viral. This allows the company to provide a look at trending content and, more impressively, to predict the future by declaring that content which is going to trend through user search.

According to a blog post by the company, "Instead of pagerank we're using a different filter -- for any given search query, we display the stories that we predict will get the most attention over the next 24 hours. Then we use bitly's analytics to refine our predictions in realtime."

This is all a part of the company's growing realtime social search initiative.

"Many pages are so new, so fresh, that they don't have any pagerank," says the company on its blog. "Often [stories] reach a broad audience on social media before more conventionally-authoritative newsgatherers amplify their messages."

The idea of this realtime search effort is to act as an "early-warning system" to project upcoming swings in what users are saying about specific brands, which is what sets it apart from traditional clipping or trending engines.

The current beta version is only available for the services paying Enterprise customers.

How Long Do Links Survive?

Michael Garrity — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 05:30:00 GMT

Who would have thought that bit.ly was useful for more than just shortening your URLs?

The popular link shortener recently released on their blog the findings of a very scientific study that they conducted about the lifespan of shared links.

Their work led them to two major conclusions: timely content has a shorter lifespan than information that can be appreciated at any time, and links posted on Facebook tend to last much longer than Twitter, but both pale in comparison to video-streaming site YouTube.

They started by studying a story titled "Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens," initially shared by StylistMagazine on Facebook. They evaluated the perserverance of the link by determining it's "half life," which is lifted from a scientific term used to refer to the period of time it takes a decaying substance to decrease by half. For their study, the folks at bit.ly use this term to refer to "the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it's reached its peak."

The following graph shows the results of their observations on the life of the link. The half-life of this particular story was 70 minutes, which captures all of the clicks that took place between the gray lines.

Next, they decided to see what the lifespan would be for a link with drastically different content. This time, they went with "East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia," originally posted by the Washington Post on Twitter.

Like the otter post, the graph for this link showed a pattern of a fast rise and relaxed drop-off. Of course, the amount of traffic coming to this link is much larger than the previous one, as an earthquake story interests more people with more diverse backgrounds than the story about small mammals. However, in studying its existence, bit.ly found that its half-life was only 5 minutes - after just 5 minutes the link had already seen half the clicks it would ever see.

What this data appears to show is that links with content associated with timely events, such as the earthquake, drive traffic much more quickly than content that can be enjoyed at any time. That is why the number of clicks in the initial spike is so much higher in the second graph. However, also because it is timely, interest in the content wanes much more quickly, because it is no longer relevant after a while. That is why the half-life of the earthquake story was so much shorter than that of the otter and kitten link.

The bit.ly people also theorized that it may be more than just the type of content that extends link life, but also where the link is posted.

Their next move was to look at the half-life of another one thousand popular bit.ly-based links. They yielded similar results.

According to their study, the average half-life of a link on Twitter is about 2.8 hours, whereas on Facebook they typically hang on for about 3.2 hours. When it comes to "direct" sources, like email or IM, it's slightly longer still, at 3.4 hours.

"So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter [sic]."

They also noted, however, that there is an exception to this regular pattern: YouTube. Links originating on the Google-owned video-streaming site typically have a half-life of a whopping 7.4 hours, which means that clickers tend to hold their interest in links on YouTube much longer than other social networking sites.

The graph beow shows the distribution of half-lifes for each referring site:

"We'd expect to see link half lifes of less than 20K seconds (5.5 hours) for facebook, twitter [sic] and links shared directly," says bit.ly, on their blog, "And we'd be very surprised to see any link maintain significant traffic for a lot longer than 60K seconds (16 hours)."

They go on to add that they would actually be surprised to see YouTube links with half-lives of anything less than 5 hours.

To finalize their study, they concluded that the half-life of the average bit.ly link is about 3 hours, unless it is published on YouTube, where it will be around seven.

Ultimately, they say "that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it's all about what you share, not where you share it!"

Well said, bit.ly.

5 Billion Reasons to use Bit.ly

Mike Phillips — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:51:00 GMT

According to the official bit.ly blog, the link-shortening service is nearing 5 billion clicks per month. Helping matters is that Twitter replaced TinyURL with bit.ly as the default link shortener.

Why does this matter to Web professionals? Trust and familiarity. Short links are great but also mysterious. Think of it this way -- you're more likely to get a click on a link that consumers are used to seeing. It's like the difference between displaying a link to a .com and a .net, .org, .info or any of the other "unfamiliar" extensions.

Sign up with a professional bit.ly account and you can customize small links even more, such as including your brand or website name in the link. You will also receive deeper analytics.

And if there's a hotter trend on the Web than any other, it's video. Bit.ly has that covered as well, with bitly.tv -- a page showing the millions of Web videos being shared with bit.ly links. So I guess that's 5,000,000,001 reasons to use bit.ly.

Bit.ly Gets New, Improved Features

Mike Phillips — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:45:00 GMT

Bit.ly, one of the most popular link-shortening services, has undergone an overhaul, including some new functions and improved features that will prove very valuable to Web professionals. It's been dubbed the "fugu edition."

The bit.ly sidebar addition (can be added to your toolbar) allows publishers to quickly shorten links while on any website then post those links to Twitter, Facebook, and through e-mail. The sidebar also shows current conversations around bit.ly links.

New tracking features will give deeper insight into how your links are shared. Start by adding "+" to the end of any bit.ly link. Also, users can now see total bit.ly clicks for any given link. That is, how many times a Web page has been clicked through from a bit.ly link regardless of who created and posted the link, in addition to the clicks generated from your link. This might be a good way to test the effectiveness of your copy when sharing a bit.ly link -- if the link is popular on the Web, but your link is not getting clicks, the copy surrounding your link might need some work or perhaps your timing is off.

A public timeline is available, so users can see your bit.ly link history. This timeline is sharable as a URL, RSS feed or can be exported as a list and could prove very valuable as a way for users to filter content from their most trusted and valuable resources. For publishers, this is could be a nice promotional tool to achieve better branding with avid users.

A new management feature pulls together the most critical data on one page, showing some basic statistics of each link plus expandable links for quick access to more details.

For those seeking even more functionality, bitly.Pro offers custom short links, deeper and real-time analytics and easy integration with other Web tools. Those interested can apply for the bitly.Pro beta program.

bit.ly Pro Going Self-Service (Open Beta)

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:49:00 GMT

URL shortening service bit.ly announced last week that since the launch of its Pro-level service, the demand has been so high that they will soon be releasing a self-service website for companies interesting in setting up their own Bit.ly-esque service.

The bit.ly Pro service has two tiers – a free version and an enterprise edition.

Users of the free Pro service will have access to a white label version of bit.ly for a custom short URL (with up to 10,000 shorten requests a day), an analytics dashboard, and finally can use/promote their own bit.ly button, so users can share content on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook using a custom short URL.

The enterprise edition of bit.ly provides all the same features as the free service, and additional dashboard features, including additional analytics, third-party application support, and end-to-end branding, as well as a customer service and support plan.

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