Best of the Bit.ly Tools

Quickly becoming my new favorite link shortening service, Bit.ly has a lot to offer, and a wide variety of tools to use with it.  Why is it the best? It offers stats, shortens links and well, I do have to say these tools play a big part too.

Here are a few bit.ly tools I’ve run across:

bit.ly preview – an add-on for Firefox that will give you a thumbnail preview whenever you hover over any bit.ly link.  If you hover over another short URL, http://tinyurl.com/5qhkwo, for example, we show the Page Title and Long URL for these links as well. (two for one deal!)

Twitter Search (for bit.ly links) – Search all the tweets from around the world, to see which have used bit.ly links to get there.

Snip-n-Tag – a Firefox extension that will shorten your URLs and add Google Analytics tracking tags.  Great for measuring traffic from Twitter.

Sidebars and Bookmarklets – The people at bit.ly have also produced two bookmarklets to use.  One will auto-create a bit.ly link out of the page you are looking at and the other will do so, and give you statistics about that link in a sidebar.

Gmail Gadget – Now you can shorten your links, using bit.ly, from within Gmail.

Who’s Using bit.ly Right Now? – A Twitter account where you can check out all the latest links that have been shared via the bit.ly link shortening service.

Have another favorite tool to use with bit.ly? Leave a comment!