shortener

Bitly, a tech company known for URL shortening, looks like it's heading toward greener pastures and making more user products. The New York-based company is said to have raised about $20 million in funding, according to tech news site The Verge, citing multiple sources. This is double the amount the company raised in its previous round of funding.

"The link shortening has always been a bit of a Trojan Horse," investor Joshua Stylman told The Verge. "Bitly is really an analytics tool for tracking content across the open, distributed web, and doing it at a massive, … Read more

Link-shortening service Bit.ly was down for a period of time last night, but the service appears to be working just fine now.

Last night, CNET editors found first that Bit.ly links were not working and then that all of Bit.ly seemed to be down. A quick search on Twitter reveals that some others had also been affected by the outage.

"Is Bit.ly down for anyone else or just me?" one Twitter user asked late last night. Another user quickly followed that up, saying "For the first time I can remember, Bit.ly is … Read more

Twitter is rolling out a couple of new features that should help you find more revelant tweets, especially those that involve you.

As of yesterday, the microblogging site is replacing the familiar Mentions tab with a new tab that displays your username, according to the company's official blog. Clicking on your username tab will reveal more than just tweets in which you're mentioned. You'll be able to see which of your own tweets are considered Favorites or are retweeted by someone also. You'll also see tweets directed to you and which tweets are popular among the … Read more

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Amazon lets students rent textbooks

Hackers attack News Corp.

Apple Mac OS X Lion launch tomorrow

CNN live news comes to mobile

Google buys g.co

Twitter has begun automatically shortening URLs pasted into tweets by its users, the microblogging site announced today.

When users compose a tweet and paste a link of any length into the Tweet box, Twitter will automatically abbreviate the link to 19 characters when users hit send. In testing for almost exactly a year, the service--called t.co--is being rolled out incrementally and will wrap and abbreviate all links shared on the site in the same way other URL-shortening services, such as Bitly, do.

Twitter said user security played a major role in implementing the new service.

"Since we show … Read more

Bitly has raised $14 million in a few years, and shrinks more than 8 billion Web addresses a month. And it's done all that without anyone running the company full time.

Until now. Technology vet Peter Stern, whose last start-up ended up being acquired by Facebook, is Bitly's first official CEO.

He's taking the reins from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who helped hatch Bitly as one of his incubator's projects and has overseen it since, while juggling lots of other balls at the same time.

Stern founded Zenbe, an e-mail start-up that Facebook "acqhired" last fall, … Read more

Google took a somewhat arcane but important step yesterday in improving its goo.gl URL-shortening service, making it available not just through the Web but through third-party software.

Google announced the goo.gl application programming interface (API) yesterday. That makes it possible, for example, to let software such as TweetDeck shorten Web addresses to more easily fit within Twitter's 140-character constraints.

As with other services such as Bit.ly, the goo.gl service can share data about the expansion of the URLs. That's useful for companies that want to know how many people clicked a link in some … Read more

Goo.gl Lite is a free extension that adds Google's Goo.gl URL shortener to the Mozilla Firefox toolbar. When you click the Goo.gl Lite icon, the program automatically generates a shortened URL and copies it to the Clipboard.

Goo.gl Lite installs much like other Firefox add-ons, although once it's installed, we needed to open the Firefox toolbar manager and drag the Goo.gl Lite icon to our browser's toolbar. Clicking Tools/Add-ons let us enable, disable, and uninstall it via the Add-Ons manager. Though the program offered no options, none are needed, since it … Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Google announces the Chrome Web Store with apps for the Web and gives an in-depth look at the forthcoming Chrome Operating System

Google also shows off a new Android tablet running the newest version of Android called Gingerbread

The next version of Internet Explorer 9 will let you specify which Web sites are not allowed to track you

Sprint is considering selling off Nextel to save $11 billion

A new virus is spreading over Twitter through URL shorteners

Bejeweled 3 is out