URL shortener bit.ly has unveiled today a number of changes to its website, many of which were announced when it made changes to its Pro service last month.
The service breaks down the changes into four categories in a tour of the new site – shorten, share, track and manage.
The company says that it has redesigned the site from the ground up and the “new release (which we’ve been affectionately calling fugu) provides enhanced features for searching through your links, more easily shortening links through a variety of means, and an increased emphasis on sharing your personal link feed with others.”
Shortening links is as easy as it ever was – just cut and paste a long link and bit.ly gives a short and easily shareable link. Beneath the shortener, the site offers a history of links with a brief set of statistics and options for each.
New sharing features, which now includes Twitter and soon Facebook, come primarily in the form of a new bit.ly sidebar. The sidebar makes it simple to share links using the service and offers instantaneous statistics on how many people are retweeting the same link and how many people have clicked on yours.
For those of you who use bit.ly often, the tracking and analytics features may be your favorite new feature. The tracking section allows you to compare how links you share fare compared to that same link shared by everyone else using bit.ly. It also offers all of the standard statistics you might expect, such as referrer domains, locations and basic click data organized by different time periods.
The final new feature, managing links, pulls all of these features together, providing you with a single page to examine all of the links you’ve shortened and shared using bit.ly and giving basic statistics on each.
Bringing together heavier analytics with easier and more integrated sharing might be a smart move for the URL shortener, especially after much speculation in recent weeks that Twitter would be adding URL shortening to its ever-growing list of features.
