Bitly Launches Social Data APIs Offering Developers New Ways to Use Social Data

Janet Wagner, January 15th, 2013

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Bitly, a popular URL shortening, sharing and tracking service, has announced the launch of Bitly Social Data APIs, a set of social data analysis APIs that allows developers access to a wide range of information about bitly data.

Image Credit: bitly Blog

Bitly Social Data APIs currently consist of eleven APIs that offer three new kinds of functionality:

• Real-time Search – Search the bitly real-time search engine by content, language, location, and more. Search results are ranked in order of attention and popularity.
• Bursting Phrases – Returns phrases that are receiving an unusually high amount of attention and click traffic volume.
• URLs Metadata – Analyze bitly data on a URL basis by querying for “keywords, topics, content, language, and location relevance.”

Bitly Social Data APIs allow developers access to data gathered from the approximately 4 billion clicks that bitly receives each month. Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at bitly, provides a few examples in a blog post of what can be done with these new APIs, such as:

“Every developer using data from the web has the same set of problems — what are the topics of those URLs? What are their keywords? Why should you rebuild this infrastructure when we’ve done it already? We’ve also added in a few bits of bitly magic — for example, you can use the /v3/link/location endpoint to see where in the world people are consuming that information from.“

Bitly Social Data APIs offer developers many interesting and exciting possibilities for building tools and apps that revolve around analysis of bitly social data. Developers interested in using the new bitly Social Data APIs can find detailed documentation at the bitly Developer site.