Bit.ly - a few features you may not know...

This post isn't a review about bit.ly, but if it was, then I would sum it up with two words; "Its great".  For those of you not familiar with bit.ly, all it does is shorten url's, which is most handy when using services such as twitter. Eg. (can you start a sentence with eg? -Ed)  the link to this weeks story from the DAC is

http://thedeadadventurersclub.com/2010/01/the-complexing-conundrum/

Through the power of bit.ly it now becomes

http://bit.ly/8luHLO

May we all dance a thousand dances in awe of this magic. I think one of the things that stand out about bit.ly is, that the interface is clean, concise and easy to use - so much so, I've never really poked around, what else bit.ly can do, until now.

Did you know you can have more than one twitter account associated ?

You can associate accounts by clicking on the account link in the top right corner. When you associate more than one account, when you shorten a URL, you get the choice of which account to tweet it from.

Did you also know, there is a plugin that allows you to shorten URL's form your browser toolbar ?

 You can find this under tools, as well as a tool for tweetdeck and twitterfeed.

You can also share which links you have shorten, if you have the make link history public option switched on (its under account options)

There are two ways in which you can share this information, firstly via a url which you can find under your account settings.

http://bit.ly/user/recent/chance1234

Or, by a RSS Feed, which again you can find, under your account settings

http://bit.ly/user/recent_rss/chance1234

Finally, and most interesting, you can reverse search a bit.ly link. There is the option to search twitter for a specific bit.ly link. You can find this under tools and it will show you, who has tweeted the link and associated traffic.

Much easier than using the search tool, is to add the word 'info' to a shorten url eg.

http://bit.ly/info/70owk3

WARNING! This can be used for good and evil