Bit.ly

= Bitly = toc Bitly is a __[|URL shortening] __ service created in July 2008. Currently, bitly shortens ~80 million URLs every day.

 The company that created bit.ly (as it was originally called before the dot was removed in August 2010 to make the company name bitly) is Betaworks. Betaworks created bit.ly at the request of its portfolio of companies that wanted a secure, reliable way to shorten unwieldy Web addresses. Twitter users, as well, needed a way to shorten long URLs so tweets with links could fit into 140 characters. It became the default URL shortening service on Twitter in May 2009 and grew from this exposure to be used by news services, major consumer product companies, media companies and individuals world-wide.

 bitly gives options of creating short links that start with bit.ly, bitly.com, j.mp, or a custom short domain which is purposed to brand content in order to make it recognizable and associated in people's minds with a specific source. This recognizability can denote a trusted source (as with nyti.ms, the New York Times bitly'd domain) and addresses the transparency issue of links. The transparency of links was an issue addressed early on by bitly because of the reluctance on the public's part to click on a link that didn't "mean anything" to them and the apprehension that it could be disguising the rerouting to a website damaging to the user or not desired by the user. A feature was added which allows the long URL address to be seen before visiting the site by adding an + to the end of the bitly address in the address bar. This feature has been supplemented by the ability to view meta-information if the + address is visited, such as the username that created the URL, statistics about clicks, a QR code which can be copied and if the link has been tweeted or shared on Facebook (example below).



 bit.ly links never expire & cannot be changed once created. This feature may help ensure that links are more stable over time and ensure their reliability for publishers of web content and information centers' utilization as short links to articles or other information based documents. bitly's short URL lengths can help with keeping links intact in email or messages sent during live online help using SMS services (such as @Meebo) in libraries. And it can be useful for SEO (search engine optimization) by allowing the use of keywords in the URL address itself, which will be easily found by search engines if a user employs the keyword in her/his search query.

 bitly is an encrypted website, with the https protocol, so all the short URLs in an individual's library are created, stored and managed in a secure environment. The interface design is simple and does not include detailed user instructions. 

Development and Growth of bitly
 Bitly has several development projects occurring for 2011, which include:
 * News.me - a news aggregator app for iPad developed collaboratively by bitly and the New York Times. Content is curated by bitly. It is one of the expansions into other areas that bitly is making. The reasoning behind it can be seen in the developer's blog posting.
 * Social search engine - Based on information gathered and monitored from the bitly urls used by social media and all other publishers who employ short urls using bitly. Not strictly a social search engine, like Topsy, because the data being pulled will be number of real-time clicks on ONLY bit.ly addresses and their white label users (those using bitly-supplied custom domain names like pep.si or cs.pn) and not the whole social media universe.

Custom Short Domains
The custom short domain became a free service in June 2011. There are over 10,000 publishers and bloggers that use custom short domains provided by bitly including The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Huffington Post blog, The Wall Street Journal, MTV Networks and Amazon.com.

 This is your second section. It can contain information about the history of the technology, implications,

The other URL shortening services
<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> While bitly is one of the more, if not the most, popularly utilized URL shorteners there are many others. tinyurl was one of the first, but ran into some reputation problems when <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> due to some mishaps with other short URL services, in particular shorturl.com which was dropped by Twitter. the misuse of

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> The White House and Smithsonian Libraries and TED talks have used this service.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> http://tinyurl.com/

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;">Flickr provides a URL shortening service for uploaded photos and videos. It is now as simple choosing a drop down menu and checking a box, but this function began as an API creation involving a function-calling routine.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;">

<span style="color: #800000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 250%;"> → @http://flic.kr/p5PJ5Ng

= References = <span style="color: #000000; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;">Flickr. [The App Garden]. Retrieved October 10, 2011 from @http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html <span style="color: #000000; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> API Libraries and Documentation for bitly. Retrieved October 10, 2011 from http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation#QR_Codes <span style="color: #000000; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1em;"> Frommer, Dan. (2009, Sep. 4) //Bit.ly Offering Even Shorter 'J.mp' URLs.// Retrieved from @http://www.businessinsider.com/bitly-offering-even-shorter-jmp-urls-2009-9