Bit.ly Improves Their Popular URL Shortening API

Matthew Casperson, April 6th, 2010

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It is not uncommon to hear services promoting themselves as having more bandwidth, more storage and more speed. Despite this services like Twitter and SMS are incredibly popular even though you can only send one or two sentences at a time. The economy of these messaging services has made URL shortening services like bit.ly a necessity. Given its integration into 3^rd party sites, it’s not surprising that bit.ly also has an accompanying API, which has just gotten an overhaul with version 3 (our bit.ly API profile):

At bit.ly we’ve been working hard to improve the speed and reliability of our API endpoints, provide simpler, more consistent response formats, and clarify our API documentation. This V3 release goes a long way towards accomplishing those goals.

The new version of the bit.ly API  can be accessed via the http://api.bit.ly/v3/ endpoint, and standardizes the JSON and XML response formats, introduces a new plain text response format for some functions, and provides universal support for JSONP. Many of these new features were the result of user requests, which can be made via the feedback page.

The bit.ly API has been used in many mashups in many different ways. Take for example Dora, a mashup of Pandora, Twitter, and Bit.ly. It allows users to easily tweet their Pandora music, include a bit.ly url to the song, and see what other users have tweeted about their artists and songs. APIs used include: Bit.ly and Twitter. More at our Dora profile.