Type of site | URL shortening, bookmarks |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Owner | Spectrum Equity [1] |
Key people | Toby Gabriner [2] (CEO) |
Employees | 234 (2020) [3] |
URL | bitly |
Registration | Required |
Launched | September 13, 2009 |
Current status | Active |
Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, [4] for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs.
In 2017, Spectrum Equity acquired a majority stake in Bitly for $64 million. [1]
From November 2023, short links cannot be created anymore by guest users, requiring users to create an account.
The Bitly URL shortening service became popular on Twitter after it became the default URL shortening service on the website on May 6, 2009. [5] It was subsequently replaced by Twitter's own t.co service. [6]
The company behind Bitly launched a similar service, but for online videos, to determine what videos are the most popular on the web. [7]
The company offers a paid solution called Bitly Enterprise that provides advanced branding features, audience intel, omnichannel campaign tracking, custom QR codes and more. Companies can use their own custom domains to generate shortened links; for example, The New York Times uses nyti.ms
and Pepsi uses pep.si
. This allows the company to push brand awareness on services such as Twitter but use the Bitly engine to generate the shortened URLs and track marketing metrics. [8] Bitly Enterprise also has advanced analytics features and uses Bitly data to provide advanced social insight tools for companies and brands.
The company uses HTTP 301 redirects for its links. The shortcuts are intended to be permanent and cannot be changed once they are created. URLs that are shortened with the bitly service use the bit.ly
domain or any other generic domain that the service offers. [9]
Starting October 12, 2010, users could automatically generate QR codes that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically directed users to shortened links. [10]
On May 29, 2012, Bitly announced "Bitmarks", a new search feature, with enhanced public profiles and an iPhone app. [11]
To see a short URL's information, that is to reveal or preview any Bitly URL https://bit.ly/x
just append a plus sign "+
", as in https://bit.ly/x+
, for example https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL
should be copy and pasted into the browser address bar as https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL+
. [12] This allows users to see and check the long URL before visiting it.
.ly
is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Libya. In 2011, the bit.ly address was set to redirect to bitly.com. [13]
The .ly TLD is controlled by the Libyan government, which has previously removed one domain deemed incompatible with Muslim law. [14]
Bitly users on paid plans can use a custom domain registered separately by the user and redirected to Bitly's servers via the DNS record.
Bitly used to offer additional domains: bitly.com and j.mp (using the top-level domain of the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States). This functionality is no longer available. [15]
In computer network communications, the HTTP 404, 404 not found, 404, 404 error, page not found, or file not found error message is a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) standard response code, to indicate that the browser was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested. The error may also be used when a server does not wish to disclose whether it has the requested information.
In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer.
.tk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand in the South Pacific.
URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened. Similarly, domain redirection or domain forwarding is when all pages in a URL domain are redirected to a different domain, as when wikipedia.com and wikipedia.net are automatically redirected to wikipedia.org.
A QR code is a type of two-dimensional matrix barcode, invented in 1994, by Japanese company Denso Wave for labelling automobile parts. It features black squares on a white background with fiducial markers, readable by imaging devices like cameras, and processed using Reed–Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted. The required data is then extracted from patterns that are present in both the horizontal and the vertical components of the QR image.
.to is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the Kingdom of Tonga.
Delicious was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.
.cm is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Republic of Cameroon.
.la is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Laos.
.ly is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Libya.
.ms is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory.
TinyURL is a URL shortening web service, which provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 as a way to post links in newsgroup postings which frequently had long, cumbersome addresses. TinyURL was the first notable URL shortening service and is one of the oldest still currently operating.
A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain. For example, ro.bot and examp.le, using the domains .bot
and .le
, suggest the words robot and example respectively. In this context, the word hack denotes a clever trick, not an exploit or break-in.
URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening" can be shortened to "https://w.wiki/U". Often the redirect domain name is shorter than the original one. A friendly URL may be desired for messaging technologies that limit the number of characters in a message, for reducing the amount of typing required if the reader is copying a URL from a print source, for making it easier for a person to remember, or for the intention of a permalink. In November 2009, the shortened links of the URL shortening service Bitly were accessed 2.1 billion times.
The McAfee SiteAdvisor, later renamed as the McAfee WebAdvisor, is a service that reports on the safety of web sites by crawling the web and testing the sites it finds for malware and spam. A browser extension can show these ratings on hyperlinks such as on web search results. Users could formerly submit reviews of sites.
High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) is a technology developed by Microsoft for encoding data in a 2D "barcode" using clusters of colored triangles instead of the square pixels conventionally associated with 2D barcodes or QR codes. Data density is increased by using a palette of 4 or 8 colors for the triangles, although HCCB also permits the use of black and white when necessary. It has been licensed by the ISAN International Agency for use in its International Standard Audiovisual Number standard, and serves as the basis for the Microsoft Tag mobile tagging application.
Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008. It supported integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. It was based in San Francisco and funded by Y Combinator.
Scan is a mobile app development company headquartered in Provo, Utah, United States. The company was founded in January 2011 by Garrett Gee together with his college friends Ben Turley and Kirk Ouimet. The company, owned and operated by Scan, Inc, was acquired by Snapchat in 2014 for $54 million.
Google URL Shortener, also known as goo.gl, is a URL shortening service owned by Google. It was launched in December 2009, initially used for Google Toolbar and Feedburner. The company launched a separate website, goo.gl, in September 2010.
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