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January 14, 2009

Announcing the bit.ly API Contest!

As you all know, bit.ly the blowfish just LOVES to shorten URLs.  In fact, he’s so excited about shortening URLs, he’s decided to sponsor a URL shortening competition!

The rules are simple: use our API to do something interesting, useful, unique, or that enables others to more easily use the bit.ly API.  Some examples of things you might want to build:

* A blog plugin
* A bookmarklet
* A Twitter bot
* An Outlook plugin
* Client Libraries for various languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, Lua, etc)- See JS api for an example: http://bit.ly/4c3Q8
* Amusing implementations for obscure platforms.
* Novel or 1337 uses of bit.ly to track, manage, or share content

Checkout http://bit.ly/goodies to see some of the things we’ve built and get more ideas

Every legitimate entry to the competition gets bit.ly shwag in the form of a pufferfish mascot and a bit.ly t-shirt.  And for the best of the best (calculated using our entirely arbitrary “hey that’s cool” index), we have something even better.

One top prize: a netbook computer and a VIP Pass to the shorty awards

Two runner up prizes: a VIP pass to the shorty awards

Additionally, the most interesting/useful entry in a number of categories will be prominently displayed on our bit.ly tools page.

The contest runs from now until January 28th [[ UPDATE: new deadline is 11:30pm EST on February 4 ]], and the submission process is dead simple.  Just post a comment to this blog entry containing a succinct description, and a link to the code or project home page.

** Here are the API docs, btw: http://bit.ly/apidocs

kortina posted on January 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (View)
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