Show us a service that can report in real time how many people are visiting millions of pages around the web and what those pages are about, that exposes that data in an API, and we’ll show you a platform we’re very excited to see work.
kortina’s bit: Bit.ly’s kind of like an EKG for the entire web, monitoring pulse and vital activity in real time.
The bit.ly plaintext API is just this url:
http://api.bit.ly/shorten?format=text&history=1&version=2.0.1&longUrl=http://cnn.com&login=bitlyapidemo&apiKey=R_0da49e0a9118ff35f52f629d2d71bf07
“format=text” will make the API return just a string instead of the full JSON response. The above call returns:
JSON api is handier in most places, but I have a few quick hits where the plaintext version is gonna work just fine. Full docs are at http://bit.ly/apidocs and more tips on http://blog.bit.ly/
From a corporate/marketing perspective, the value of bit.ly is pretty clear—you get a lightweight way to track campaign efficacy in real time. Last night I was thinking about bit.ly from a consumer’s point of view and what value bit.ly provides there.
The last wave of web companies facilitated a basic human need for communication—sites like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, etc. make it easy for anyone to communicate with their friends or broader audiences. The web consumer need for publishing is being served pretty well, but new needs result from increased publishing activity.
Because everyone is publishing, going forward there is an obvious need for better filtering tools to find value and separate signal from noise in this flood of content. The companies facilitating publishing have realized this need and are working on solutions (Facebook News Feed is the best filter I’ve seen for diverse media types, Twitter’s 140 character text only limit is another superb filter), and there are also whole companies who’s mission is to filter: Digg, FriendFeed, Techmeme.
This need for filters gets a lot of attention, and I’m confident the imminent ubiquity of Facebook Connect and the simplicity of the Twitter UI will evolve to solve filtering problems amazingly well. There’s another need that results from publishing that gets a lot less attention, however.
At a brownbag lunch many months ago, John Borthwick shared a brilliant insight that I have been marinating on ever since:
Why publish something if no one reads it?
This may seem obvious, but it has been seminal for me in how I have been thinking about the web over the past few months. Most people don’t publish for the sake of publishing, they publish with an end in mind—to promote a product, to gain social status, or just to feel listened to and loved.
This is why bloggers are obsessed with Google Analytics, why Flickr recently added stats for photo views, and why YouTube has a stats section right below each video. The YouTube and Flickr examples are more consumer friendly, however, because they bring attention stats right into the consumer UI; GA, on the other hand, is sandboxed into a separate, businessy interface. Plus, you can only use GA on properties you own, so you couldn’t use it to track views on your YouTube videos, a comment you make on someone else’s blog, or anything you publish to Facebook or Myspace.
bit.ly is essential in the consumer publishing web for just this reason: people are publishing everything everywhere, and bit.ly lets you track anything anywhere. When you publish somewhere you can’t get stats, you miss out on the satisfaction of knowing you connected with other people that drove you to publish in the first place. bit.ly reclaims your stats, servers this need for attention, and helps answer the question posed above: yes, someone is listening, so keep publishing.
