URL Shorteners have certainly been a hot topic this week. I feel better educated and have switched to bit.ly. The stats are really cool. And so is the Preview Plugin. Thank you for your great work!
Nick
· 8 months ago
Your points are interesting, but I still think url shorteners are a plague for the web in general. No matter what, you guys are breaking the foundations of the Internet my making it less accessible. In a way, you are making some parts of the web "private", to the extend that any web crawler would have to go through your (currently pretty slow) API to be able to recover the real underlying links and "web graph". And unfortunately, despite your good will, this is a major issue that will always come along with any url shortening system. I am curious to see how long it will take you (ie. betaworks) to convince twitter to use (or buy) bitly as the default url shortener (as opposed to tinyurl) - without any doubt, you guys will make money with this... not sure it will be for the greater good though...
Maciej Ceglowski
· 8 months ago
It's Joshua, not Josh
joshua schachter
· 8 months ago
Since redirects are part of HTTP serving (bit.ly sends a HTTP 301 moved with a Location: header) by what mechanism precisely does the system continue to work if the website is down?
toddml
· 8 months ago
Joshua,
While we endeavor to provide reliable service with a number of levels of redundancy, you are indeed correct that an intermediate HTTP request is an intermediate HTTP request, and as with anything else on the internet, this is a potential point of failure. I don't think anyone is debating this point.
We do however, intend to make our catalog of short url to long url mappings public (beyond the existing one at a time lookups via the API), in order to provide transparency and distributed redundancy of the data set.
Ultimately, our short url service provides a utility to our end users (in this case, distributed analytics and tracking to those who share rather than originate the content being propagated), and our end users appreciate that utility.
At the same time, we have taken great pains to not modify or interrupt the user's browsing experience, and will continue to do so as we move forward.
kellan
· 8 months ago
Trying not to be offended, everyone else gets a name, and I get "Flickr article". Official Flickr blogs are here and here.
toddml
· 8 months ago
Updated for attribution.
kellan
· 8 months ago
Thanks. Just another reminder I haven't done a good job of meeting the NYC techies.
Reaperducer
· 8 months ago
I have seen a bit.ly intercept page only once, and it was a false alarm.
Bit.ly incorrectly blocked a link to a Chicago Tribune article page based on information from SURBL.
It would be nice if there was a way to report false positives.
@adaircameron
· 8 months ago
I'm a late comer to the world of Bit.ly. Not sure why it's taken so long to check you out but I'm SO glad I did. I've added your Bit.ly sidebar tool along with your firefox preview addon. The two work perfectly for me so I just want to comment to say a BIG thank you.
Bit.ly is a truly great product!!!!!!!!
Ad Manager
· 5 months ago
I got a spam and no way to report it. This is the spam link: bit.ly/E7hiD
wholesale jewelry
· 1 month ago
You are spot on with these answers, I could feel as if I am the one answering all these questions, thanks.
All Comments
No matter what, you guys are breaking the foundations of the Internet my making it less accessible. In a way, you are making some parts of the web "private", to the extend that any web crawler would have to go through your (currently pretty slow) API to be able to recover the real underlying links and "web graph". And unfortunately, despite your good will, this is a major issue that will always come along with any url shortening system.
I am curious to see how long it will take you (ie. betaworks) to convince twitter to use (or buy) bitly as the default url shortener (as opposed to tinyurl) - without any doubt, you guys will make money with this... not sure it will be for the greater good though...
While we endeavor to provide reliable service with a number of levels of redundancy, you are indeed correct that an intermediate HTTP request is an intermediate HTTP request, and as with anything else on the internet, this is a potential point of failure. I don't think anyone is debating this point.
We do however, intend to make our catalog of short url to long url mappings public (beyond the existing one at a time lookups via the API), in order to provide transparency and distributed redundancy of the data set.
Ultimately, our short url service provides a utility to our end users (in this case, distributed analytics and tracking to those who share rather than originate the content being propagated), and our end users appreciate that utility.
At the same time, we have taken great pains to not modify or interrupt the user's browsing experience, and will continue to do so as we move forward.
Bit.ly incorrectly blocked a link to a Chicago Tribune article page based on information from SURBL.
It would be nice if there was a way to report false positives.
Bit.ly is a truly great product!!!!!!!!