Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg: Bitly Now
The magic behind Bit.ly are the stats that the service makes available on the underlying domains being clicked. Investor John Borthwick
explained it all to investors in an email we obtained earlier this month:
bit.ly has been on a tear since we launched it last summer — let me sketch out what it is, why its useful and offer some data points on progress. bit.ly is on its surface a link or URL shortener, helping people take long and unwieldy links and make them short and easy to share via email, Twitter, Facebook etc. But once you shorten a link with bit.ly the fun begins. You can put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link and see, real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around these social distribution networks.
Bit.ly Now will take all of this deep (and wide) data on popular real time URLs and turn it into a service. That’s where the inevitable clash with Digg comes in.
