bit.ly blog

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 comment below.

We’re looking forward to beta-testing many new features with the thousands of companies and individuals in our beta program. Because of the overwhelming demand for access to the beta program, we now have a terrific first set of testers and we have decided not to provision additional beta accounts at this time.

Not one of the chosen few in our beta testing crew? Not to fear. We’ve reopened the signup form here and will begin inviting more users over the coming weeks and months. Thanks for your patience while we build bitly.Pro!

Team bitly.Pro

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 able to log in there and set up their accounts in a matter of minutes.

In the meantime, we’ve put together a FAQ to answer your questions and let you know a bit more about the product. In addition to the free service, we’ve been working on the bit.ly Pro enterprise edition, which we’re currently testing with a handful of organizations, including The Onion (onion.com), The New York Times (nyti.ms), and Pepsi (pep.si). bit.ly Pro will have two tiers: the free version, and the enterprise edition, which will be a paid subscription service. The FAQ begins with the features of the free service:

What features are included in the free bit.ly Pro?

1. Whitelabel service for a custom short URL, with up to 10,000 shorten requests a day.
2. The bit.ly Pro dashboard, which rolls up analytics about the most viral content from your domain.
3. The bit.ly button, which lets users share articles on Twitter or Facebook from your site, using your custom short URL.

What features are included in the Enterprise edition?

The paid service includes the following:

1. custom short URLs, buttons, and dashboards for multiple domains.
2. advanced dashboard features, including additional analytics and 3rd-party application support.
3. end-to-end branding — if you shorten a link at bit.ly, or use bit.ly on a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, you’ll notice that when you shorten or share an article from theonion.com (for example), it will resolve to an onion.com short URL instead of a bit.ly-branded URL. This will result in both greater transparency for end users about link destinations and in millions of additional brand mentions for publishers in the bit.ly stream.
4. a customer service and support plan.

Won’t some end-to-end publisher domains be longer than bit.ly?

Yes, though we recommend that publishers use very short domains. Note end-to-end branding will not be a feature of j.mp. So if users want to ensure the shortest possible URL and are indifferent to exposing underlying brand, then they can use j.mp either by navigating to the j.mp website or by selecting that option in most Twitter clients.

What do I need to set up bit.ly Pro?

To sign up for either version of bit.ly Pro, you need three things:

1. A registered bit.ly username.
2. A short domain that you own and manage, for custom URL shortening.
3. The domain that you wish to monitor in our real-time dashboard.

You can sign up here for the bit.ly Pro service. If you’re interested in reselling or distributing bit.ly Pro, please contact bizdev@bit.ly.

How much does bit.ly Pro cost?

bit.ly will not charge for the custom domain service or the basic dashboard. They will be free products. Free means free. But it also means that we can’t provide a lot, if any, support service (i.e. phone support, etc.) under the free plan. Pricing for the enterprise version will be announced in the coming weeks.

What about my existing short URLs created under bit.ly or j.mp?

All of the statistics associated with your bit.ly or j.mp username will be preserved under your bit.ly Pro account. Once you have a custom domain setup under bit.ly Pro, those hashes migrate seamlessly to your custom domain (i.e. if you created the URL http://bit.ly/1234 under your existing username, under bit.ly Pro, the URL http://mycustom.domain/1234 would redirect to the same destination with the same statistics when you look at the associated info page).

Are there any changes to the API for bit.ly Pro?

Once a custom domain has been configured for your bit.ly Pro account, domains shortened under the associated username and API key will now shorten URLs with your custom domain. You do not need to change your API key.

What is the difference between the dashboard and existing bit.ly URL statistics that I get to when I add a “+” to a bit.ly URL?

bit.ly tracks the real time social distribution of any given URL. That’s the data you see when you add a “+” to a bit.ly URL. The Pro dashboard rolls up that data for your domain and provides aggregate real-time statistics from the past 24 hours. 

Can we have multiple users on each account?

There is a one-to-one mapping for bit.ly usernames and custom domains for bit.ly Pro. If you wish to have multiple custom domains for each of your brands/web properties, you will need to register a different username for each.  

Will my custom domain work with 3rd-party tools?

Once a custom domain has been configured for your bit.ly Pro account, all 3rd-party tools that allow you to enter your bit.ly username and API key will now shorten URLs with your custom domain.

Do you have any guidance on how/where to select/research/obtain short domains?

The most important decision for bit.ly Pro is choosing and purchasing a good short domain to match your branding. We strongly suggest the domain name be kept to 5-6 characters. Check out this list on Wikipedia of all of the top-level domains and get creative. Click on the desired TLD on the page to find out the restrictions and available domain registrars. Few people will ever type these domains - instead they will be created via the API, shared, and clicked. Hence, the branding of your short domain should focus on being visibly recognizable - abbreviations and msspllngs lk remvng vwls wrk prtty wll. There’s a scarcity of characters in Tweets and SMS, so every character saved grants you more ability to annotate your message. We do not acquire domains for users.

Thanks for your patience while we make bit.ly Pro awesome.

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, seriouslymedia, Stocktwits, Techcrunch, and Typepad.

While G. Battle has been working to scale out the Pro service, our dev team decided to launch a little something for the holidays: bit.ly Labs.  The first project in the labs is j.mp, the super-short link-shrinker that we pushed out a few months ago. It’s been gaining market share, and is now one of the biggest little URL shorteners. Every character counts.

Second. For a while now, as we’ve watched bit.ly grow to more than 2 billion clicks a month, we’ve thought about the best way to surface our “top bits” — the most interesting, most quickly-trending links across the whole of the bit.ly service. We decided to start with a bite-sized approach. Our second Labs project showcases the most viral videos shared on bit.ly. We call it bitly.tv.

bit.ly TV is like the internet itself. There are parts of it that are terribly serious and important — like the footage of students battling the basiji on the streets of Tehran — alongside other bits, like the upside-down French bulldog puppy and the Ukelele kid, meant to surprise and delight. Our friends at feedtrace helped us to develop the bitly.tv prototype; we also want to thank the team at backtype.com for their assistance.

Please take a look at bitly.tv, and tell us what you think!

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 AOL, Associated Content, Bing, Clicker, The Daily Telegraph, foursquare, GDGT, Hot Potato, The Huffington Post, IGN, kickstarter, Meebo, MSN, /Message (Stowe Boyd), MTV Networks, The New York Times, OMGPOP, oneforty.com, The Onion, slideshare, someecards, Stocktwits, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network — which includes WSJ.com and MarketWatch.com — and blogger Baratunde Thurston (baratunde.com).

Users and publishers benefit from the additional transparency that this private-label service provides.  When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link.  The service includes all the bit.ly features users and publishers have come to expect.  Placing a simple “+” at the end of any bit.ly link (including these white-label, bit.ly-powered links) takes you to real-time information about that page and how it is being shared: how many people clicked on that particular link, where they came from, and more.  For publishers, the new service allows them to keep their brand visible while maintaining access to bit.ly statistics.

We’re also excited to be introducing a unique real-time dashboard that will provide publishers with even more information about their bit.ly traffic.  It’s a real-time view of how a given publisher’s content is being distributed across networks like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and services like email, SMS, and instant messenger:

Real-time view of what is trending on this particular domain — updated every 15 seconds

Both parts of bit.ly Pro - the dashboard and the custom URL service - are currently free beta programs. We’re looking forward to growing them and making them more widely available. If you’re a publisher or a blogger interested in these services, we’d love to hear from you — please fill out this form, or contact bitlypro@bit.ly and provide us with your bit.ly username.

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 control servers, drop sites and other nefarious activity.

The second is the Websense Threatseeker Cloud service, which we’ll be adding to our arsenal of anti-spam tools. Websense will analyze the web content behind bit.ly links in real time, using heuristic tools and reputation data to flag spammy URLs, malicious content and phishing sites.

The third is Sophos, an innovative security service whose behavioral-analysis technology goes beyond blacklists, to proactively detect spam and malware.

We’re delighted to working with best-in-class partners like VeriSign, Websense and Sophos.

The team here at bit.ly remains committed to transparency. If you’re concerned about any given bit.ly link, you can add a “+” sign to the end of the URL to see more information about it, or download our preview plug-in.

Our team of community volunteers offers another layer of protection. As always, you can flag spam to their attention by writing to abuse@bit.ly.

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 (available at http://bit.ly/app/summary ).  On your summary page, you can see a view of the sites and countries where people are clicking on all of the Bit.ly links you have created.

The Clicks Report shows which days over the past week drive the most click traffic. Digging into the Referrer Report will give you an idea of which distribution channels and partner sites are generating the most clicks on your Bit.ly links. Likewise, the Location Report will help identify in which countries you are running the most successful distribution and marketing using your Bit.ly links.

Currently, your summary stats are only available for the past week, but within the next few weeks we’ll make a month-long aggregate view available as well.

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 redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities.

The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters.  Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies.

But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break.  Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them.

A group of URL shortening companies and other interested parties realized the potential for harm to the user community and formed the 301Works.org organization to provide more security for the people who use these services every day.   Currently more than 20 URL shortening organizations have participated in an earlier form of this collaboration.

Bit.ly has already begun putting its short-to-long URL mappings in escrow with IA, which will run the 301works.org Working Group.

The full text of the press release can be found at 301works.org, along with the list of participating companies.

Want to join? Contact @stoweboyd, who will be taking on the role of 301works project director. Congrats, Stowe, and thanks!

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 shortened.  Any changes you make will only appear in your history listing, so feel free to change titles to anything you like in order to make them more recognizable and personally useful.

Another change is that custom names (keywords) are now displayed along side the history entry.  This means you won’t have to do any extra work to remember which bit.ly custom name points to which bit.ly short url when you want to look at your statistics.

It’s worth noting that this history system works a bit differently than the old system.  Under the old system, if you shortened the same URL multiple times, we would simply move your old entry to the top of the list chronologically (we would never allow multiple history entries for the same link).  The new system acts a bit more like an event log (or your browser history) in that shortening the same URL multiple times will result in multiple history entries which will remain in their original chronological order unless you decide to delete them from your history.  You’ll always receive the same short URL for any long URL you shorten however.  There are a few places, such as custom name creation and certain sidebar/sharing uses which currently create multiple history entries for things that are really a single shortening even.  We’ll be working out those kinks over the next day or so, so please be patient.

The new history system that’s just been rolled out will allow us to continue to add some interesting and useful features in the coming weeks, so as always, stay tuned.

On another note, a few weeks ago we added the ability to upload and post media files directly through the bit.ly interface without having to leave the site.  Based on user feedback, we’ve upgraded the interface in order to make it easier to upload both photos and videos.  To use this new feature, simply click on “Share a File” in the bit.ly URL shortening bar.  Your file will automatically be turned into a bit.ly link, complete with all the tracking you’re used to receiving from your other bit.ly links.

Go ahead and j.mp

A few weeks ago on the bit.ly blog, we commented on our appreciation for short, concise domain names.  While the bit.ly domain is almost as short as it gets, for some people, every character counts. With that in mind, today we’re announcing j.mp, powered by the bit.ly platform.

j.mp has the same short URLs, metrics, history, user accounts (you’ll have to login again, but your bit.ly accounts will carry over), and customization you’ve come to enjoy on bit.ly, all on a short, memorable domain.  In fact, any bit.ly URL also works as a j.mp URL.

You’re welcome to continue to use bit.ly, as it’s not going anywhere.  But if you desperately need those two additional free characters in order to make your point, feel free to use j.mp instead.