bitly blog

Device Usage on the Social Web

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:22:28 -0500

We use our phones differently than our laptops, and our tablets differently than our gaming devices. We decided to take a deep look into the bitly data to figure out exactly how differently, and we found some surprises!

We analyzed the bitly data for the entire year of 2011 to understand how people use different hardware devices, and how this changes the way that people consume information. We looked at two types of data, the raw numbers and the use percentages (to make different platforms with wildly varying usage levels easy to compare). Web browsers were still the primary tool for accessing online content, followed by smart phones, tablets and gaming machines.

How are bitly links used across different platforms?

Desktop computers are most heavily used on weekdays before noon. Phone traffic peaks at roughly the same time. Tablets are most used at Tuesday at 5pm. Gaming devices (Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Playstation), Thursday at 5pm.

One of the most interesting patterns is the peak, small valley and then another peak that both phones and tablets exhibit. The second peak is roughly at the same level Monday through Thursday, but drops off on Friday and doesn’t appear on the weekends. This pattern is shifted over for tablets, with the second peak occurring later in the evening. This reflects the aggregate behavior patterns with these devices, showing us when the world is sleeping, eating, and taking a mid-afternoon coffee break.

Which platforms have similar usage patterns?

In the above plot, similar behavior is colored white; very different behavior is colored dark blue. From this plot we can see three surprising insights:

Windows and Linux users behave similarly on the social web! Geeks aren’t that different from the rest of the world. :)
Mac OS X is used more like a mobile device than either Windows or Linux on the desktop.
The Kindle is used in a very different manner to engage with the social web. We find that the majority of Kindle usage is much later in the evening than other devices.

From this data, we can say that device should definitely be a consideration when you create and share content on the social web. Think carefully about the physical context of how people will read your content! If you’re making a tablet application, make sure you test it with someone late at night lying in bed, and if you’re making an early-morning newsletter, you know exactly what time and device to target it at.

This post lovingly crafted by the bitly science team.

SOPA and PIPA on the social web - right now!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:58:49 -0500

The social web is exploding with SOPA and PIPA related content today! We’re seeing nearly ten clicks per second on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation”, over two clicks per second on SOPA related web pages, and almost 1 click a second on PIPA related web pages.

The top few most popular pages, of over the 12400 current URLs we’re seeing people share on SOPA and PIPA, include:

White House Will Not Support SOPA, PIPA - Opponents of online piracy regulation bills SOPA and PIPA scored a major victory on Saturday.
SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy - O’Reilly Radar - SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy. The solution to piracy must be a market solution, not a…
TechnoBuffalo Joins January 18 SOPA/PIPA Protest by Going Dark - SOPA and PIPA present is one of those times. TechnoBuffalo would like to announce that it will be…
What Is SOPA? - …by it’s cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. Hearings for both are on hold for now, but the SOPA…
SOPA explained: What it is and why it matters - The tech industry is abuzz about SOPA and PIPA, a pair of anti-piracy bills. Here’s why they’re…? The controversial pair of bills, SOPA and PIPA, have sparked an all-out war between Hollywood and…
Wikipedia Blackout: Websites Wikipedia, Reddit, Others Go Dark Wednesday to Protest - Do not try to look up ” Internet Censorship ” or ” SOPA ” or ” PIPA ” on Wikipedia, the giant online encyclopedia, on Wednesday. SOPA and PIPA are two bills in Congress meant to stop the illegal…

And here is a time series plot that shows how the social web woke up today and clicked on shared links about SOPA and PIPA:

The red line is SOPA and the blue line is PIPA. The x-axis here is time (in UTC; add 5 to get EST and 8 to get PST) and the y-axis shows clicks per second every half an hour.

Here at bitly we’re excited to see this important message propagating quickly, even if the wikipedia blackout means we cannot brain today…

bitly in 2011

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:40:54 -0500

From Kim’s short-lived marriage to the earthquake up and down the east coast of the US, more data resonated through the social web this year than ever before.

actual real human clicks on bitly links (by day) in 2011

World events reshaped the geography of the Internet, such that we saw 392 times the number of clicks on Egyptian (.eg) URLs in 2011 than in 2010.

The number of new social sharing platforms continued to increase with the addition of new networks like Google Plus and chime.in.

Even diddy and the Dalai Lama got their own bitly short domains this year:

and

And boy does the social web love celebrities!

all of the clicks in 2011

Yes, 3% of all clicks on links went to pages about top celebrities this year, including some of our favorite gaffes and rumors:

But don’t lose faith in humanity! We saw significant traffic to the top news stories around the year’s meaningful events:

Jan 2011: Obama’s Speech, The New Yorker
Feb 2011: Photos from the Protests in Egypt, The New York Times
Mar 2011: Massive Earthquake Hits Japan, boston.com
Apr 2011: Is Sugar Toxic?, The New York Times
May 2011: Adm. William McRaven: The terrorist hunter on whose shoulders Osama bin Laden raid rested, The Washington Post
Jun 2011: Kissing Vancouver Riot Couple are Identified, The Hollywood Reporter
Jul 2011: Murdoch exits London home with arm around Brooks, Reuters
Aug 2011: Best Places to Live, CNN Money
Sep 2011: Live Stream from Outside the Georgia Prison Where Troy Davis Is to Be Executed, The Nation
Oct 2011: Apple: Steve Jobs Has Died, Time
Nov 2011: The Herman Cain crack-up, The Washington Post
Dec 2011: The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!, Forbes

Of course, there were lots of cats…

cutest cats by month

And a ridiculous number of rickrolls!

Overall, it was one big year with more than 25 billion clicks on more than 7 billion
URLs!

Happy holidays, social web.

This post lovingly crafted by the bitly science team. We would love to hear from you!

'Tis the Season for Movies (and Data)!

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:23:47 -0500

As we approach the peak of holiday movie season, we’re curious to see which of this year’s films will be break-out hits. With the help of our new reputation monitoring service, we can use bitly data to see which movies people are talking about, as these conversations unfold. By entering relevant search terms (in this case: the titles of the films themselves, and other keywords such as “movie” or the names of the films’ actors) we can discover trending content around holiday films in real-time, and the sentiment associated with that content.

We’re collecting data about every film being released at the end of the year, so the list is more expansive than your normal ‘Top 10 Holiday Movies of the Year.’ We’re hoping as you watch the ebb and flow of these graphs over the next few weeks that our data will help you predict which movies will be box office hits. Share your predictions in the comments below, and stay tuned for a post by our data science team about what movies are in the lead.

How Science Lovers see the Internet

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:20:06 -0500

This month we collaborated with our friends at Scientific American to produce a visualization of how people who read about science see the internet (hint: there are a few surprises!)

You can pick up the December issue to see it in glorious print on the last page of the magazine, or click through below to play with the interactive visualization.

Do kittens really rule the Internet?

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:17:00 -0500

We long ago crowned cats the kings of the internet, but is that really the case? What data supports their reign?

And, with Thanksgiving approaching, might the turkey be competitive?

We went deep into the bitly data to discover which animals really rule the internet, and the answer might surprise you:

While cats have a respectable lead, the winner is clear — dogs are 37% of the total results in the cute animal set, and feature in 50% more pages than cats!

Our favorite dinner bird gave a strong showing, however, hovering between monkeys and bears. If we dive into the turkey-based content, we see an amazing knitted hat (left), the basic roast turkey recipe from RealSimple and, of course, a LOLTurkey.

We wish you a happy Thanksgiving filled with delicious food, cute animals, and entertaining URLs!

bitly and Verisign

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:22:01 -0400

One of our investors brought his teenage daughter by the office the other day. She was puzzled.

“Bitly has an office?” she asked her father. “I thought it was, you know, just part of the Internet.”

We took that as a great compliment — over the last three years, bitly links really have become a ubiquitous part of the web. A recent Microsoft Research report even claims that short links can account for as much as 1% of the new URLs created on any given day.

With that kind of scale comes a great responsibility in terms of technical reliability and redundancy. Which is why we’re pleased to announce a new agreement with Verisign, which operates two of the Internet’s root nameservers and much of the web’s DNS infrastructure. If there’s a single company that qualifies as the steward of the Internet, it’s Verisign.

Verisign and bitly already work in tandem nearly every time a short URL is clicked. On any given day, bitly translates hundreds of millions of short URLs into standard web addresses; last month alone, we handled 8 billion such redirects. Verisign takes those long URLs and translates them into IP addresses, resolving over a trillion monthly DNS queries, including every URL hosted on a .com, .net or .gov domain.

These two steps constitute the core infrastructure of the social web, and bitly’s relationship with Verisign aims to make them completely reliable and blazingly fast.

Beginning this fall, bitly’s primary data center will be hosted on Verisign’s global infrastructure. That’s saying a lot, since Verisign’s infrastructure has maintained the .com namespace for more than a decade with zero percent downtime.

Verisign’s architecture has been integral to the growth and stability of the Internet at large, and we could not be more excited to work with them. Scientists at both companies are already poring over volumes of DNS resolution data — data that will help us answer fundamental (and fundamentally awesome) questions like: “what actually are the most popular websites on the Internet?” and “just how big is the Internet, anyhow?”

Stay tuned, as we’ll be sharing our findings here.

We See into the Future

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:04:00 -0400

bitly sees the future!

Not in a time-travel, causality-breaking way, of course. bitly sees the future by knowing what is popular and exciting on the internet before anyone else does.

Scientifically-minded purists will argue that we only know the present. Fair enough. Yet we can see much of the future by understanding the present while others are still catching up with the past.

bitly has been working on real-time search powered by bitly data for quite some time. Unlike other search technologies, which weight results by the quantity of references or links, bitly search weights results by cross-platform social engagement. Collaborative filtering (the wisdom of crowds) is an obvious value of social media, and real-time search is an obvious way to package that value.

Finally, we are ready to release several different services based on this new type of search technology. The first, launching today, is called “reputation monitoring.” What it lacks in catchy naming, it makes up for in awesomeness: given a search term, it will alert you when there is a sudden change in engagement and/or sentiment around content involving that term. Because these alerts are built on bitly’s realtime social data, you can find this content long before you see it on a search engine based on crawling web pages, and probably long before you see it on a news site.

We created some interesting monitors and thought we would share them with everyone. Try these: politics, products, and startups. You won’t get the email alerts when these sample terms trend, but you can click on the graph and explore the content. The monitors live off of real-time bitly data, which on average lead major search engines by 12 hours or more. If you have any ideas on what else we should be monitoring, let us know. Of course, you can monitor any terms you like with a bitly Enterprise account.

Extracting the ebb and flow of trending topics and identifying viral content hours or days before you will see it in the news, on Google, or on Bing is quite amazing. We don’t know where it will lead. The internet made the world flatter. Social media and real-time content sharing are making the world thinner.

You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:30:00 -0400

How long is a link “alive” before people stop caring? Does it matter what kind of content it is, or where you shared it? At bitly we see a lot of links, and while every link is special, we’re learning a few general principles that we can share.

Let’s take a look at one particular story - Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens - which was first shared by StylistMagazine on Facebook on Tuesday at 7:12am. If we plot clicks over time for this link, we see:

Rate of clicks per 10 minutes on “Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens”

We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak. For this link the half life was 70 minutes, which captures all the clicks between the grey lines on the graph above.

Let’s look at a second link - East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia - , this one first shared by the Washington Post on Twitter.

Rate of clicks per minute on “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia”

While the exact details of the traffic are a little different, and the scale of the traffic to this link is much larger, we see essentially the same pattern: a fast rise, and a more relaxed drop-off. Noticeably though this link a half life of only 5 minutes: after 5 minutes this link had seen half of the clicks it would ever see.

This link is associated with a very timely event (an earthquake on the US East Coast) as opposed to the previous link (pictures of otters and kittens are clearly interesting all the time). We think that this difference in content drives the difference in dynamics of these two links. However, one alternative theory that comes up again and again is that the dynamics of the link traffic depend on where the link is posted: do links posted on facebook last longer than they do on twitter?

So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter.

Distribution of half-lifes over four different referrer types. Facebook, twitter and direct link (links shared via email, instant messengers etc.) half lifes follow a strikingly similar distribution.

Not all social sites follow this pattern. The surprise in the graph above is links that originate from youtube: these links have a half life of 7.4 hours! As clickers, we remain interested in links on youtube for a much longer period of time. You can see this dramatic difference between youtube and the other platforms for sharing links in the image above.

The graph shows the distribution of half lifes for each referrer. So we’d expect to see link half lifes of less than 20K seconds (5.5 hours) for facebook, twitter and links shared directly, and we’d be very surprised to see any link maintain significant traffic for a lot longer than 60K seconds (16 hours). But for youtube, we’d be a little surprised to see half lifes of less than 5 hours!

In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention. Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers. This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it: on the social web it’s all about what you share, not where you share it!

This post brought to you by the bitly science team! Questions or comments? Email us.

bitly Has an iOS 5 SDK!

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:18:58 -0400

As you may have heard, the forthcoming fifth version of Apple’s iOS has some very cool share-to-Twitter functionality baked directly into the operating system. We have been hard at work on an SDK that will allow iOS applications to automatically use branded bitly short links with this functionality. (For example, news.me shares to Twitter with on.news.me branded links.) Our SDK also supports iOS 4 via Twitter OAuth.

Since iOS 5 has not yet been released, we can currently only offer this SDK to developers who have signed the applicable NDAs from Apple. If you’re working with iOS 5 and want to check out our SDK, drop us a line at api@bitly.com!

bitly Acquires Twitterfeed

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:14:45 -0400

For years now, we’ve worked closely with our friends at Twitterfeed to enhance their social media publishing tools with branded short links and realtime data. Today, we are excited to announce that we have acquired Twitterfeed, and to welcome both Twitterfeed and its users to the bitly family.

The publishing workflow provided by Twitterfeed constitutes a core part of the bitly ecosystem. Along with other products (such as SocialFlow and dlvr.it) that use bitly to share content and track engagement, Twitterfeed is both creating and consuming gobs of bitly data every day. Twitterfeed had over a million active users last month, and we look forward to empowering them with even more actionable insight from bitly data. We also look forward to bringing the enhanced sharing functionality of Twitterfeed directly to bitly.com, making it easier than ever to collect, organize, shorten and share links.

We are already hard at work with the Twitterfeed team thinking through ways that combine our efforts to make the social web a better place. We will keep you in the loop as we roll out changes to both Twitterfeed and bitly, and we welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Some Hacks from the 1.USA.gov Hackathon!

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:56:34 -0400

Many thanks to everyone who came out to our 1.USA.gov hackathon! It was great to see so many friendly hackers and open data enthusiasts collaborating and sharing ideas (and devouring 11 pizzas in about as many minutes).

Our friends at USA.gov posted a summary of the hacks created at all four nationwide hackathons, including an awesome visualization of NASA’s popularity worldwide created by Adam Laiacano at our New York office. Here are a couple more hacks that came out of the New York hackathon:

* A fascinating set of data visualizations by Harlan Harris.

* Sonification of 1.USA.gov data by Niki Yoshiuchi.

Want to hack on the 1.USA.gov data? It’s still publicly available on the USA.gov website. We’ll be hosting another hackathon soon — keep an eye on the hackabit Meetup group for more information!

Our Data Could Be Your Life

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:29:54 -0400

Do you know exactly what you were reading 10 years ago this very moment? 10 years from now, you may. The data we create is a living archive of our interests and intentions, and we’re creating more of it every day — a staggering 1.2 zettabytes last year alone. At bitly, we are always looking to learn from our data, and we are thrilled that a particularly interesting set of bitly data is being made publicly available for hacking and analysis.

This Friday evening, bitly will host the New York branch of a nationwide, 4-city 1.USA.gov open data hackathon. The USA.gov team has made the realtime clickstream data for all 1.USA.gov URLs open to the public, providing an unprecedented window into the way that we engage with government content. We are extremely excited to see what talented hackers and coders can do with such a rich and fascinating data set.

In advance of the hackathon, the Measured Voice team has put together a microsite at govclicks.measuredvoice.com that ranks the most popular 1.USA.gov URLs per day by click count (an average of about 56,000 total daily clicks over the last few months). The diversity of content at the top of the list is fascinating; a NASA Tweetup announcement alongside information about the recent FAA furloughs and a strongly worded FDA warning to Diamond Foods about walnut packaging.

This basic ordered list provides a compelling look at the popularity of specific government URLs – and it is only scratching the surface of the underlying data. Where in the country are most people looking up information about FAA furloughs? (And, using a complementary API like SimpleGeo’s Context, what do we know about the demographics of those regions?) Which social networks drive the most traffic to NASA’s website? What US government content is most frequently accessed outside the US? There’s a wealth of insight encoded in the 1.USA.gov data just waiting to be discovered.

Indeed, working with data isn’t just a matter of crunching numbers and writing code; it also means knowing what you’re looking for and knowing what you’re looking at. Through the right lens, the data from the 1.USA.gov project could answer questions that we hadn’t even thought to ask – and some of the data that answers those questions may very well be yours.

If you’d like to explore this data with us, then come to our NYC office this Friday (or visit the other 1.USA.gov hackathons in San Francisco, San Diego and Washington D.C.) and build something new!

Where does your traffic really come from?

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Lately there’s been a lot of discussion of the relevance of referrers as a way of discovering the source of traffic to a site. At bitly, we see billions of clicks per month on across multiple platforms, instant messages, emails and mobile text messages. This gives us a unique window onto the way people share social objects, and we see how they propagate through human networks and across the various social networks.

For example, you can see this graph of a typical link spreading through multiple networks; in this case, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. This link was first shared on Twitter. It’s possible to undercount traffic from the originating service by up to a factor of five. We demonstrate why below.

The reality of content sourcing and proper attribution is a bit more complicated. What happens when someone sees a link on one network, then re-shares the same link? It’s simple to track this behavior within one social site, but what about when it spans multiple sites and sharing mechanisms?

Unfortunately, referrers are a poor metric for assigning proper attribution when they work, and many links are viewed on clients or mobile devices (approximately 11%) that don’t even support the referrer protocol!

First, let’s examine referrer the data that a typical publisher will see. Since traditional and online-only publishers tend to use different methods of promoting their content, we broke them out separately:

This tells us that different platforms drive different amounts of social sharing to different publications.

Next, we located the top 100 publishers with active web traffic. This Bitly100 represents a “Dow500”-like index of top publishers, and shows how different social web sites contribue traffic in an aggregate view that any web publisher can use to calculate the impact of various networks on their traffic.

We saw traffic from 153,338 distinct referring domains to the top 100 publishers in the month of June. Twitter.com was 11.4% of the referrers to that traffic. As you can see in this graph, the greatest percentage of referrer traffic can be classified as “direct.” Direct traffic is traffic that comes without a specific referrer code. In the complex social web environment, how might we trace the original source of this traffic?

As in the first figure, we can assume that links propagate from one network to another, as you can observe from the correlations in click times between twitter.com traffic and direct traffic. If the initial link was shared on twitter, and you see 60-70% direct clicks, it’s possible to conclude that the twitter traffic is undercounted by a factor of ~5.

This demonstrates that traffic observed from multiple networks may originate in one particular network. In the case of the URL examined at the beginning of this post, it originated on Twitter and spread out through events on other, diverse platforms. At bitly, we tie it all together.

Visualizing The NASA Shuttle Launch with Public 1.USA.gov Data

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:10:00 -0400

A couple weeks ago, we announced a fantabulous 1.USA.gov open data hack day to be held on Friday July 29th. Since then, our data team has been playing with the clickstream data for the 1.USA.gov project, which has been publicly mirrored on the usa.gov site. Here’s a nifty visualization of click traffic to 1.USA.gov links on July 8th, the day of the last manned NASA space shuttle launch:

Since NASA.gov is one of the many US government and military sites that shortens to 1.USA.gov, you can see the entire world light up as the launch takes place around 16:30 GMT.

If you’re interested in playing around with this data at our office on July 29th, you can sign up for the New York branch of the 1.USA.gov hackathon on our Meetup page here. Information about the San Diego, San Francisco and Washington D.C. hackathons (hosted by Measured Voice, SimpleGeo and USA.gov respectively) is available via the USA.gov blog. Wherever you are, we encourage you to hack away at the 1.USA.gov data, and share your project via Twitter using the #1USAgov hashtag.

To help get you started, our friends at Measured Voice have put together a tool called “gogogon,” which produces a list of the daily list of the most-clicked 1.USA.gov URLs. You can play around with the gogogon code over at github.

Log In to bitly With Your Twitter/Facebook Account!

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:59:33 -0400

You can now log in to bitly using your Twitter or Facebook account!

Just head over to bitly.com and select “Sign in with Twitter” or “Sign in with Facebook.” If you already have a bitly account, you’ll be able to link your Twitter/Facebook account for single-click sign-on. If you do not have a bitly account, we’ll make one for you!

If you have any additional questions about logging in to bitly with your Facebook or Twitter account, have a look at our freshly updated FAQ.

Finding Truth in bitly Data

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:50:42 -0400

We are constantly in awe of the insights that can be drawn from big data. Often what we instinctually believe to be true turns out to be incorrect. A few weeks ago, two members of our data team (Hilary and Brian) made a wager about what time of day sees the most iPad usage. (Brian won.)

A weeks worth of log files and thirty minutes on a Hadoop cluster later, we had our answer. The iPad was used more in the evening than it was during the day. We began to investigate how the day of the week and the time of the day affected usage across particular platforms. This analysis led to some interesting observations about how the iPad was different from any other computing platform. The good people at ReadWriteWeb offered to publish our findings in a post on their site.

Data can lead us to unexpected conclusions. For example, we were surprised to see that iOS devices are now responsible for more bitly decodes than MacOS X. On June 2nd, MacOS X devices accounted for 7.3% of bitly decodes. The iPad alone constituted 1.7% of bitly decodes (as we show in the results presented here), and the iPhone was responsible for 8.0% overall bitly decodes. Combining these figures, iOS accounts for 11.3% of bitly traffic.

In the coming weeks, we will post further observations about how the bitly data has contradicted our assumptions about who, when, where, what and how people engage with online content.

1.USA.gov Open Data and Hack Day Friday, July 29th!

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:35:00 -0400

Back in March, the USA.gov team announced a partnership with bitly to shorten content hosted on .gov and .mil domains to 1.USA.gov URLs. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be joining USA.gov, Measured Voice and SimpleGeo to host a 1.USA.gov hack day in New York, Washington D.C., San Diego and San Francisco on Friday, July 29th.

Interested hackers will have lots of fun data to play with: The realtime bitly clickstream for the 1.USA.gov project has been made available to the public, and is documented on the usa.gov site. This is the first time that a realtime feed of bitly click data has been mirrored and made available for your hacking pleasure, and we’re incredibly excited to see what you do with it!

We’ll be hosting the New York branch of the hackathon at our office fortress in the Meatpacking District at 6pm on Friday July 29th. For more information and to sign up, please visit the hackabit Meetup group. Details about the other three locations are available on USA.gov’s blog. And even if you can’t make it in person, we’d love to see what you’re working on; Tweet your projects with the hashtag #1USAgov, and feel free to contact us at hack@bitly.com.

Want some inspiration? The USA.gov team put together a proof of concept visualizing geolocation and user agent data for June 2011 1.USA.gov clicks.

We hope to see you soon!

Break it down! See which links drove your daily/hourly click counts

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:43:19 -0400

You can now use your bitly analytics dashboard to see *which* links contributed to your overall daily and hourly click counts! Just click on the bar corresponding to the number of clicks on a particular day or hour, and we’ll unroll a list of the links that contributed to that number, handily sorted by popularity. For more information about the platforms, referring sites and countries that drove click traffic for a particular link, you can click through to its bitly “+” info page.

Just log in to bitly, click the “analyze” tab, and begin exploring the peaks and valleys of your daily and hourly metrics.

bitly Pro is now... bitly!

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:33:12 -0400

Since launching in December of 2009, our bitly Pro whitelabel service has grown to power over 10,000 custom short domains, including but by no means limited to gat.es (The Gates Foundation), diddy.it, (Diddy), dalaila.ma (His Holiness the Dalai Lama), and cart.mn (South Park Studios).

To make our whitelabel service available to as many of our users as possible, we are not only bringing bitly Pro out of beta — we are building it right into the core functionality of bitly itself. As of today, every bitly user can set up a custom short domain from within their bitly account settings, free of charge and with no waiting period. Just register the short domain of your choosing, point it to our servers, and hook it up to your bitly account at http://bitly.com/a/account or by selecting “Settings” from the drop-down menu under your username.

If you want some ideas for short domains to use with bitly and information about where these domains can be purchased, domai.nr and 101domain are great place to start.

Along with a custom short domain, every bitly user can now register a tracking domain to see how their content is performing across the distributed social web. Once you’ve set up a tracking domain (which must be a domain that you own and control), your bitly analytics dashboard will provide a summary of all shortening and click activity on bitly links pointing to that domain, including links that were created by other bitly users.

As the universe of bitly short domains continues to expand, we’ve set up a central location for shortening, sharing and tracking your links at bitly.com. Just head over to bitly.com, log in with your existing bitly account (or create a new account), and select the short domain you’d like to use for each link you create. You can also choose a default short domain from within your bitly account settings, which will apply both to links you create on bitly.com and to links you create with any third party clients you have logged in to with your bitly account. Whether you prefer bit.ly, bitly.com, j.mp or your own custom short domain, the links you create will all appear in your user history for easy sharing and tracking.

Exciting new projects are being powered by bitly’s custom short domain service every day; MapQuest is now using bitly to create a canonical mapq.st URL for every address in the world, and the United States government is using bitly to shorten all applicable .gov and .mil content to 1.usa.gov. And now you can use bitly to power your own custom short domain without any additional sign-ups or permissions! Boom.

Our Enterprise service is unaffected by this change - in fact, we’ve recently rolled out some visual enhancements to our Enterprise dashboard, making it even easier to track your content in realtime across the entire social web.