An Introduction to Android (Slides)

Slides from the Android presentation at RMIT, comprising a high-level introduction on the new mobile operating system and developer platform. For more information on local activity, visit Android Australia.

Why would I use bit.ly?

This is the question I get from people who either don’t use Twitter or have never thought much about link sharing. But let’s go back a step, what is bit.ly?

bit.ly is a URL shortening service. It transforms a given series of characters comprising a URL into its short-form equivalent. For example, this 41 character link to a third party website (Google Groups) can be shortened to just 13:

Link groups.google.com/group/android-australia
Short Link bit.ly/1aEMpI

You might think this isn’t an overly impressive exercise, especially if you’re not a Twitter user limited to 140 characters of expression. That’s fair, what about this Google Maps link?

Link maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=rmit+university&sll=-37.826861,144.995165&sspn=0.009457,0.01929&ie=UTF8&ll=-37.807173,144.96416&spn=0.002365,0.004823&z=18&iwloc=A
Short Link bit.ly/iUUDS

The need to share this type of link is quite conceivably within the realm of everyday activity; organising a weekend away, having birthday drinks, what about a map link where the address block in your email signature used to be? The original link is 183 characters long. The bit.ly equivalent is 13 characters – and it’s always that long (or 14). Even from a practical perspective that makes the link far easier to remember, write down or share via email and so on.

URL shortening has actually been around since 2002 and there were already more than 90 providers of the same service in January 2008 (see here). bit.ly is a relative latecomer to the URL shortening party having only launched in mid 2008 but claims its users already click on 160 million links each week. [A quick check on Alexa.com seems to support this idea showing bit.ly having quickly surpassed TinyURL (see here)]. This growth is in part thanks to Twitter which selected bit.ly as their provider of choice.

So the first point to note is link shortening is useful for the purpose of sharing. Check. The next logical questions are how do I use it and how many people actually click on the link?

First the usage – there’s three ways to get your link shortened:

1. Go to the bit.ly website and copy/paste the URL
2. Add the bit.ly bookmark button (‘Bookmarklet’) to your favourites list
3. Add the bit.ly Sidebar button which creates a browser pop-up using JavaScript but doesn’t navigate you away from the current page

Next – and to my mind, most important – how many clicks are these links actually getting? Basic information readily available on the website includes:

• number of clicks your link received
• aggregate clicks through bit.ly to the destination URL
• global location where the clicks occurred
• conversations on Twitter which include the link

Other users may link to the same destination URL and everyone can access information relating to aggregated clicks, however, only signed-in users receive a unique link with a distinction between theirs and the total clicks figure. So create an account and sign in – anyway it’s free.

Ok so we can shorten, share and measure the link clicks. Are there any risks involved using short URLs? Yes, there are some.

bit.ly is only just over a year old. With growth like they’re experiencing, you better believe there could be server load issues. I’ve yet to notice problems with the service so hopefully they manage better than Twitter did during its usage explosion.

There’s also the issue of security. Prima facie, you can’t tell where a link leads and there’s no URL structure to provide the hints. bit.ly uses services such as Google Safe Browsing to flag 2-3 million links per week as spam (about 1-2% of total). Failing this there’s two solutions:

1. A plug-in created for Firefox provides you basic information about the destination URL
2. Just add ‘+’ to the end of any bit.ly link will show you the detailed information mentioned above; destination, page title, etc.

When hovering over the link bit.ly/13tmsi, Firefox creates a pop-up as follows:
Similarly, adding ‘+’ and following the link bit.ly/1aEMpI+ shows information including:

There’s a whole raft of implications for link tracking in a professional capacity and usage of bit.ly over Google Analytics – but this will have to wait until next time so stay tuned for more on this topic!

Written for PC Update magazine, September Edition: http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2909/2909article5.htm