bitly blog - Latest Comments in A Big Week for Little URLs

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

ค้าขาย — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:16:35 -0000

You are spot on with these answers, I could feel as if I am the one answering all these questions, thanks.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

Ad Manager — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:44:22 -0000

I got a spam and no way to report it. This is the spam link: bit.ly/E7hiD

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

@adaircameron — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:55:30 -0000

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!!!!!!!!

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

Reaperducer — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:02:05 -0000

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.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

kellan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:17:47 -0000

Thanks. Just another reminder I haven't done a good job of meeting the NYC techies.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

toddml — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:29:37 -0000

Updated for attribution.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

kellan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:53:04 -0000

Trying not to be offended, everyone else gets a name, and I get "Flickr article". Official Flickr blogs are here and here.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

toddml — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:31:41 -0000

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.

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

joshua schachter — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:30:53 -0000

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?

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

Maciej Ceglowski — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:28:58 -0000

It's Joshua, not Josh

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

Nick — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:56:20 -0000

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...

Re: A Big Week for Little URLs

Hal Goodtree — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:28:41 -0000

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!