Since we launched bit.ly Bundles on Monday evening, our users have created over 14,000 bundles of bit.ly links! We’ve seen bundles of recipes, bundles of Complexity Dilberts, bundles of news, bundles of design, bundles of music, bundles of photos, bundles of fonts, bundles of domain name registrars, bundles of BBC, bundles of bundles, and bundles more. We’ll be sharing some of our favorite at @bitlybundles - let us know if you have a bundle to show off!

To make bundling even easier, you can now bundle links from anywhere on the web with our bit.ly Sidebar bookmarklet. Just drag this bit.ly Sidebar link to your browser’s bookmark bar (1), then click it while you’re on any page you’d like to bundle.

At the bottom of the sidebar, you will find a list of your 10 most recently shortened links (2), including your current location. Just select the links you’d like to bundle, hit the “Bundle” button, and voila! The links you have selected can now be reordered, annotated, and shared with a single bit.ly short URL.

If you’d like to add your own spin to another user’s bit.ly bundle, you can easily recreate and remix that bundle using the “Clone Bundle” button:

Once you’ve cloned a bundle, you can reorder and modify it however you’d like — you can even include a link to the original bundle to show where you got started. Happy bundling!

We are thrilled to announce the launch of bit.ly bundles, a new way of sharing multiple links with a single bit.ly short URL.

You can start bundling links right away!  Just head over to bit.ly, shorten some links and then hit the “Bundle” button.

Every link you add to a bundle will include a rich media preview (courtesy of our friends at embed.ly) and a bit.ly click count, and can be customized with a title and description. Try it out with your favorite video, photo, and any other links you’d like to curate and share!

If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out a travel guide to Washington, D.C. from our friends at Jauntsetter, a collection of videos soundtracked by the Free Music Archive, and a bundle of fun from Superchunk drummer/comedian Jon Wurster.

So, click on over to bit.ly and get your mace out… let’s get ready to bundle!

In two weeks’ time, our pufferfish overlords will begin selecting the winners of our fabulous API contest.  You have until midnight on Wednesday, November 17th to read up on our API, build something awesome, and tell us about it at contest@bit.ly. If you are in the New York area, you can swing by our hackabit hackathon to wrap up your project and behold the grand-prize MakerBot Thing-O-Matic in all its glory.

If you’d like to show us your project before the deadline, we are happy to provide feedback and guidance while there’s still time to tweak your code! You can check out some suggestions that we posted in our contest announcement. We also encourage you to reach out to the bit.ly API google group, which is chock full of friendly hackers with lots of experience working with our API.

Here are a few submissions we’ve received in the first two weeks of the contest:

• The bit.ly button: a jQuery plugin that incorporates bit.ly click counts into sharing functionality (http://bit.ly/cZ4Ina)
• bitly-im: a tool for accessing the bit.ly service from any jabber client (http://bit.ly/acS14M)
• A bit.ly dropzone destination for easy shortening and sharing on your Mac desktop (http://bit.ly/DPirl)

If you want to share something you’re working on with your fellow bit.ly enthusiasts, just leave some information about your project in the comments section of this blog post. If you have any other questions or concerns, don’t be shy — we can be reached at contest@bit.ly.

Good luck!

NOTE: The deadline for the API Contest has been extended to 12 Noon ET on Monday 11/22

When we held our last API contest back in January of 2009, we were thoroughly impressed by the clever, inventive and generally rad submissions we received. Since then, we’ve added loads of new features and endpoints to our API, including some user-level OAuth endpoints we wrote about here.

Sooooooooo… we’ll be officially kicking off another bit.ly API contest at the next installment of our hackabit hackathon on Wednesday October 20th, for which you can register here. The prizes are awesome and plentiful. Behold:

* 1st prize (1) Makerbot Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer
* 2nd prize (3) 1TB USB hard drive enclosed in a vintage nintendo game (Zelda, Metroid, etc)
* 3rd prize (5) Set of BuckyBalls magnetic building spheres

Lest you doubt the majesty of the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, check out this timelapse video of an older MakerBot printing the Statue of Liberty:

We encourage you to come up with creative and unexpected uses for the bit.ly API, but here are some suggestions to get you started:

* A mobile client for sharing and tracking bit.ly links
* A Wordpress plugin that turns all the links on a blog into bit.ly links and tracks them
* An application comparing metrics for multiple users
* An easy way to share bit.ly links via text message for mobie users
* A widget for displaying bit.ly metrics on a webpage
* A mobile application that reads and/or displays bit.ly’s new QR codes 

Our API is documented in full at http://api.bit.ly. If you want access to register an OAuth application, or have any questions, please feel free to contact us at api@bit.ly. We will be concluding the API contest at another hackabit Hackathon on Wednsday, November 17th. Please send all submissions to contest@bit.ly, and feel free to discuss your projects in the comments here, in our API discussion group, or on the message board for our hackabit hackathons.

Good luck!

NOTE: The deadline for the API Contest has been extended to 12 Noon ET on Monday 11/22

We are excited to announce that bit.ly has completed Series B funding. The Series B was led by RRE Ventures, and General Partner Eric Wiesen will be joining the bit.ly board. It’s been an amazing two and a half years since the founding of bit.ly. In 2008, bit.ly emerged as the dominant platform for shortening links in the social web. In 2009, bit.ly grew like crazy and started offering more ways to share and manage links (i.e. with the launch of tools like our popular sharing bookmarklet: http://bit.ly/pages/sidebar). In 2010, bit.ly has become the most successful platform for publishers and enterprises to track engagement using their own branded short URLs.

Growth throughout this period has continued at an amazing rate. bit.ly sits at the confluence of three broad market trends: the growth of content sharing via social services, the growth of mobile, and the emergence of “the web of things”. As these trends move though the market, short links are the addresses that connect people, things and machines. The short link business has now become an established piece of the social real time web infrastructure. The entry of Google and others into this business affirms the importance of the category. At bit.ly, we believe that in a few years every link will have a short equivalent — so our job at bit.ly is clear. We will continue to scale and innovate while providing unparalleled service to our users as the leading independent provider.

So far this year, bit.ly links have been clicked over 40.6 billion times. The chart below shows the daily click volume — what we call “decodes”. The blue line represents daily clicks, through which you can see the weekly variance (i.e. higher click volume on weekdays, lower click volume on weekends) and the red line represents a 3-week moving average. On Tuesday of this week we had our biggest day ever for bit.ly links created. There have been over 4 billion unique URLs shortened using bit.ly. For every unique URL, and for all the 40+ billion clicks, bit.ly offers real time metrics with the simple addition of a “+” at the end of any bit.ly link (e.g. http://bit.ly/djZ9g4+). The bit.ly web site is now the 69th largest according to Google’s Doubleclick adplanner.

Early this year the bit.ly team rolled out http://bit.ly/pro, our white-label service. As of today, we are working with over 3,000 large customers and many small ones, including individuals who want their own custom URL service. Larger customers include Amazon (amzn.to), Microsoft (on-msn.com), Yahoo (yhoo.it), The New York Times (nyti.ms), Pepsi (pep.si), Foursquare (4sq.com), Formspring (4ms.me), CNN (on.cnn.com), ESPN (es.pn), BBC (bbc.in) and NPR (n.pr). bit.ly pro URLs now represent 7% of all the URLs circulating in the social/real time web.

Finally, as I mentioned at the outset, bit.ly has just completed a Series B round led by RRE. We are also excited that AOL Ventures has joined the round, along with the existing investor group who participated: OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg, David Shen, and betaworks. Eric Wiesen will join Bryce Roberts on our board. Speaking for the bit.ly team as a whole, we couldn’t be more excited about the future — thank you to everyone, especially our users. We work hard every day to deliver a great service to users — this new investment will give us the opportunity to do that even better.

We are pleased to announce some new user-level metrics features in our API, making it even easier for developers to provide bit.ly users with realtime feedback about their trending bit.ly links.

We are currently using the new /v3/user/realtime_links API endpoint in our Chrome Extension to notify bit.ly users about their “Trending Bits.” This feature provides a popup notification whenever one of a bit.ly user’s links receives a certain number of hourly clicks. (This threshold can be modified within the extension’s settings.)

Other user-level metrics endpoints provide an overview of click traffic, referrers and originating countries across all of a bit.ly user’s links.  All of these user-level metrics endpoints are accessible via OAuth 2, making it easy for users to access their bit.ly data via third-party applications without having to enter their bit.ly API key, username or password.

These new API endpoints and our OAuth implementation are fully documented at api.bit.ly.  If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact api@bit.ly, or sign up for the bit.ly API Google Group.

This Wednesday September 15th at 6pm, we will open the doors to our New York office for our third monthly hackabit hackathon! Our first two hackathons spawned lines upon lines of JavaScript, Python, C, Haskell, R, and many other delightful languages.  A Wikileaks data visualization project from last month’s hackabit ii even got a shout-out in the New York Times bits blog.

This month’s hackathon promises to be particularly action-packed, as we will be rolling out some awesome new metrics-related bit.ly API endpoints. We will be holding another API contest in the near future, so be sure to come by if you want a head start!

If your project isn’t bit.ly-related, have no fear - all code is good code at our hackathon. Come hack, snack and throw back (some energy drinks) with us! Click here for more information and to register - we hope to see you there.

Following this week’s OAuth and apps announcements, some of our users have inquired about how bit.ly will work with Twitter’s new link-wrapping service. Link-wrapping will enable Twitter to collect traffic data and block spam, but it will not interfere with bit.ly analytics, bit.ly Pro custom domains, or bit.ly Enterprise usage — you will be able to shorten, share and track links with bit.ly exactly as you do now.

Many of our partners are already using their bit.ly Pro short links with t.co, since all links shared via the Twitter Tweet Button have been wrapped in t.co since the button launched last month.

Link-wrapping will happen automatically and invisibly in the background. For example, if you share the long URL for NPR’s “Take Five” Jazz Sampler (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90379427&sc=tw&cc=share) directly via the Tweet Button, the resulting tweet will look like this:

Though the link shown is automatically passed through t.co, it is displayed here as a truncated version of the underlying long URL. Note that the link as it is displayed here is not, itself, a valid and functioning URL — copying and pasting “npr.org/templates/stor…” will result in a 404 error, and the long URL itself may not display consistently across different Twitter clients.

bit.ly Pro links integrate easily with link-wrapping. Our friends at NPR are currently using their bit.ly Pro short links with t.co and the Twitter Tweet Button, so a link shared via the Tweet Button at NPR currently looks like this:

The link shown here is also automatically passed through t.co, but the underlying bit.ly Pro (in this case, n.pr) link is displayed. This link is complete and functional as shown, and can be easily copied and pasted (and appended with a + for instant realtime metrics: http://n.pr/c0ujwA+).

We are working closely with Twitter and many other social media platforms to continually improve our service across the web — for more information about sharing bit.ly and bit.ly Pro short links to many such platforms, please visit our guide to third party tools for publishers.

bit.ly has a lot of data, and we are always learning interesting and unexpected things from it.  For example: approximately .05% of URLs shared through bit.ly include content about cheeseburgers. (An inclusive search for cheeseburgers and “cheezburgers” raises this figure to .07%.) By contrast, roughly .01% of URLs shared through bit.ly include content about automobiles.

We’re currently hard at work on several systems that will expose some of the interesting data we’re playing with. In the meantime, we’d like to introduce @clickabit.

Clickabit is a curated list of some of the surprising and delightful things that are trending in the bit.ly data stream. You’ll see a wide variety of timely, bizarre, useful, and intriguing links that we think you’ll enjoy, and you’ll see them here first.

Follow us if you love the Internet!

As promised, we have put together some additional tips for using bit.ly with a number of popular cut-and-paste sharing buttons and widgets including the Twitter Tweet Button.

Please visit our guide to Third-Party Tools For Publishers. This page includes working examples and code snippets for the most popular sharing tools.

For smaller publishers who cannot cache links on their backend, we are now providing a simple JavaScript wrapper for sharing bit.ly links using the Twitter Tweet Button:

 

 
Tweet 

Be sure to use your bit.ly login and API Key (which you can always find at http://www.bit.ly/a/your_api_key) with the code above.  

This implementation simply shortens the page URL and then displays the Twitter Tweet Button in its standard fashion. All Tweet Button functionality is maintained.  And, since our JavaScript wrapper uses your bit.ly login and API Key, it will automatically return custom bit.ly short domains for Pro and Enterprise users.

If you have any questions about using bit.ly with this or any other publishing tools or platforms - or have your own tips or tricks for using bit.ly with the sharing tools of your choice - do not hesitate to contact support@bit.ly!