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July 08 2008
Bit.ly launches today
Shared by Josh Bancroft
Dave's perspective on bit.ly, a very cool new URL shortener.
Now, someone whip up a Firefox extension so I can shorten URLs with a right-click, and I'll be 100% converted.
Until that happens, I'm sticking with TinyURL, because of the TinyURL Creator Firefox addon. It costs me way too much to time load the page for the URL I want to shorten, click a bookmarklet, wait for the shortener page to load (and, optionally, tell it "yes, I really want to shorten this"), and then get my shortened URL, which I manually copy for pasting elsewhere.
With the TinyURL addon, I right click, choose "Create TinyURL for this page/link", wait a second (during which my TinyURL is created and automatically placed on the clipboard for pasting), then click the "Close" button. Simple, and it saves me 10 or more seconds every time I shorten a URL (which I do many times per day, thanks to Twitter).
So, who's going to step up to the plate, and code up a Firefox addon to do this for Bit.ly? Any takers? :-)
First, go read Marshall Kirkpatrick's awesome writeup of bit.ly.I was part of the team that defined the product, the development was done at Betaworks in NY (where I am right now), the team led by John Borthwick, and a bunch of ex-AOLers. Betaworks is also an investor in Summize.
Here's the official blog post.
The idea of bit.ly is that a lot more could be done with url-shorteners. I found I needed to develop my own for the NewsJunk project. They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from.
They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I'm pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we're not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.)
And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here's an example of the data available for a link I posted this morning on Twitter.
I'm a minority shareholder in this project, so know that I have a considerable interest in its success. Of course I think it's a great service, and I hope you give it a try.
Over on ReadWriteWeb, Allen Stern asks if there's a way to make money, and there is. We'll hopefully be ready to talk about it in a couple of weeks.
