A Close Look at bit.ly, the URL Shortening Service

The rise of Twitter and instant messaging has made bit.ly more popular. The URL-shortening free service has become very useful tool for users across the web. According to company official blog, Bit.ly is getting nearly 5 billion clicks per month. Additionally, as per Google double click ranking, the website has become 76 th most-visited destination which is ahead of sites like eBay, MapQuest and the New York Times. It got a huge popularity last year when Twitter, the microblogging site where users shrink long URLs to fit tweets within the 140-character limit, replaced TinyURL with bit.ly as the default link shortener.

URL shorteners help people share links to webpages they like without having to copy a long URL onto the place that may contain letters, numbers and symbols. The service was launched in 2008. bit.ly has some additional features compared to other URL shorteners such as TinyURL  like letting users track statistics on how many people clicked their links and how many other people were linking to the same thing.

Bit.ly also announced a host of businesses and bloggers who have signed up for bitly.Pro, a premium service, in the past few months. They include Yahoo, MySpace, Pepsi, C-SPAN, Amazon, Mozilla, NPR, the New York Times and Toys “R” Us. The pay version of bit.ly offers advanced analytics tools and the ability to brand shortened links