Bitly Gets Back To Its URL Shortening Roots

In response to some very vocal feedback in the past week, Bitly has tweaked its new interface to make URL shortening faster, easier and more prominent.

Many Bitly users were upset when the company relaunched its website last week and, in the process, shifted more toward a social experience than a URL shortening one. As I wrote in our coverage, “URL shortening almost seems like an afterthought in the new design.”

Bitly says it heard the feedback:

We mean it when we say we’ve been reading all your tweets and emails. And we’re listening! In the week since our release, we’re already making adjustments, so that saving and shortening links in the new bitly is a whole lot easier.

What Bitly Changed

Bitly’s home page has new messaging and functionality. When it launched last week, the call to action was “Add a bitmark” — no mention of shortening a link, even though that’s how the process began. The call to action now says “Paste a link here…” and, on a mouse click, it changes to “Paste a URL to save and shorten it.”

And, as soon as a URL is pasted there, Bitly immediately shortens it and makes the shortened URL more visible in a popup window.

That’s the Bitly web experience. The social and saving aspects are still part of the site, but they don’t take precedence over the basic URL shortening function.

The company’s blog post explains that the process is a bit different for its bookmarklet and Chrome extension. It also mentions several other smaller updates since last week’s relaunch.

But the main thing — and probably the most welcome among Bitly users — is that shortening links is pretty much as easy as it was in the old Bitly.