Bitly updated; lets you do more now

Popular link shortening service, Bitly updated their service, yesterday; and using the word ‘updated’ here is heavily downplaying it. The site, if we may say so has now undergone a major design and feature refresh and you can now do a lot more in addition to just shortening links. The service, in line with their sentiments in their blog post - “We want this to be the single best place for you to save and share your links and to discover interesting things from your friends and the entire web,” now allows users to save their favourite links (Bitly now calls them bitmarks, like bookmarks), be it of their favourite recipe, an interesting review, etc. and share them with their contacts across Facebook  and Twitter.

To begin with, Bitly now allows you to save and share bitmarks that as aforementioned are essentially links, which you might want to keep for going back to in the future. After a basic log-in, through either Facebook or Twitter, or a sign-up, one can find the ‘Add the bitmark’ option on the top right corner of their page. Here users need to paste the URL to the article, video, song that they want to add. Once done, the saved bitmarks appear below on their page.

Bitly updated

Users can then either ‘Add a note’ to this bitmark, or ‘Share’ it with their contacts and/or get a shortened link to the bitmark by clicking on an icon that resembles an ‘i’. Users, in addition to this can also add their bitmarks to a bundle. Users can create several bundles, comprising several links and organize them, and/or share them with their contacts. Additionally, users can decide if they want to share their bitmarks publicly, or keep them private by changing the settings, accordingly.

In an official blog post, Bitly also confirmed that an iPhone app for the service is out too. “Our new iPhone app allows you to save, view and share your bitmarks while on the go,” the post added. Have you tried the new Bitly, yet? Do you think that you can look beyond Bitly, the link shortening service and lap up the new features? What do you think of the new look and working of the service? Let us know in the comments section below.