Bit.ly

You must have seen them. Short urls. Perhaps you even used them? I want to discuss a few of the interesting sides of bit.ly. As a cliff hanger: the last part is my favorite ;)

What's bit.ly?
Nowadays, the movies you download with a usenet/news server can easily be 8 Gb. Or more. Just one example of how a we're not counting kilobytes anymore like we did in the days of 2400baud modems. Still, somehow, there is a huge demand for short urls. Readability is not a necessity (something I can relate to). Sole booster of this demand must be Twitter. Somehow in this day and age of streaming video on your cellphone, Twitter managed to grow big with an application that limits your posts to 140 characters. And now tons of inventions are popping up to find ways around this limit.

Yes, but what is bit.ly?
Eh, yes, enough about Twitter, that's going to be another post. Bit.ly is a service that enables you to pack your lengthy url into something much shorter. So you can send it around using Twitter or what else. The user clicks the link, the request goes to bit.ly's server, is translated and the user is redirected to the original location.

Using bit.ly, and why
Using bitly is easy, go to bit.ly and paste your url. Press copy and your shortened url is on your clipboard. Alternatively, you can make an account at bit.ly and organize your shortened urls. You may use bit.ly for the aforementioned reason of wanting shorten a url. You may also want to use it if you don't want to 'spoil' to what domain the link is actually going to (goatse anyone?). A third reason may be that you want to gather clicking statistics.

Statistics
Making an account at bit.ly is especially useful because bit.ly provides a lot of statistics about your short urls. You don't have to be logged in for that, but it having an account is very handy to keep track of all your data. You can see click counts, referring sites, etcetera. You can even see how often (and when, where and by whom) your short url is (re)tweeted. 

Interesting part
Now here comes the interesting part. At least, I found it quite interesting and I have used it a few times already to gain insight into how others are doing their online marketing. You can access any bit.ly link's statistics by copy pasting the link in your address bar, add a 'plus' sign and press enter. If there's more bit.ly links pointing to the same location there's also a bit.ly link that contains an aggregate of all data. This way you can, for instance, learn about the effectiveness of certain approaches without trying everything for yourself.