Change Gonna Come to bit.ly...Today
Shorter URLs
bit.ly the blowfish loves to make things smaller. And because he’s been working out, now he can make your URLs even shorter! Hashes (the part after http://bit.ly/) used to be six characters. Since bit.ly’s gotten all pumped up (steroid free, by the way - bit.ly wants to be a role model to kids everywhere), he can crunch most of your URL hashes down to four characters. If you’re really lucky (around 1.4% of the time) he can squeeze it down to three characters. Occasionally when he runs into a really tough URL, it’ll be five or six characters (maybe 10% of the time). bit.ly has a ton of great features of offer, but we know for some people every character can count, so bit.ly is working hard to make your life easier.
http://bit.ly/<hash>+ redirects to info page.
We always want to check the stats for interesting bit.ly links, so we made shortcut for jumping to info pages: just append a “+” to the end of any bit.ly link to jump to the stats for that link. For example, to see the stats for http://bit.ly/4AUD68 you can now just type http://bit.ly/4AUD68+ and you’ll be redirect to http://bit.ly/info/4AUD68 .
BackType comments on info page
In addition to aggregating conversations from Twitter and FriendFeed, the info pages about blog posts show the number of comments found on each post. We use an API provided by backtype.com to pull in the comment count as well as the names of people who’ve commented on each post. You can check this out by visiting the info page for this blog post by Umair Haque: http://bit.ly/info/4AUD68
Twitter and Facebook to sharing links for your recently bit.ly links
We added two new ways for you to easily share your recent bit.ly links: Twitter and Facebook. We also added a quick link to share a page with your Facebook friends using the info bookmarklet.
Shorten multiple URLs from home page
One of our most frequent requests was for the ability to shorten another URL from the home page without refreshing. Just click the new “Shorten Another” link and you can do so—this is probably my favorite of the new features. Thanks for the feedback.
1 year ago