Sure we knew tinyurl.com for a while which shortens your large shared urls to a tiny url for easier use in Email, Twitter, etc. Now there is bit.ly, a new url-shortener. A completely new url-shortener with a lot of great features, I'll mention some of them...
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Statistics (click to enlarge)
Statistics of the last 15 urls are kept on the front page of bit.ly. A local cookie in your browser stores the last urls submitted. Now you can see how many of the people that you sent the url to, actually clicked on your link. The clicks are sorted by Email, Twitter, Facebook etc.
The Bitly bot tweets the most clicked bitly url every hour. You can add it to your followers list on Twitter.
The Browser Bookmarklet which you can drag into your browsers toolbar makes it very easy to generate the short bitly url. And, when signed in, immediately send it to Twitter.
Map Bookmarklet for Google Maps creates short links to google maps. A short demo:
The Preview Plugin for Firefox, whenever you hover over a bit.ly URL on any web page, it displays a tooltip showing the Page Title, Long URL, and any Click Data there is about the page the URL links.
With regular newly added features to bit.ly, I think it's a great new service to enrich our daily techies life! My first Bitly: http://bit.ly/X0OJK