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Bitly Shoots Itself in the Foot and Eats its Own Toes

Bitly — formerly one of my favorite link shortening services — shot itself in the foot this week and ate its own toes in releasing an incredibly confounding and confused “update” to what was once a perennially pristine service that was dead nut simple to use.

Now, when you login to Bitly, you are presented with this horrible screen that talks about “Bitmarks” and other junk that makes no sense.  Where is my update box for Twitter and Facebook? All I want to is shorten my links with the Boles.co domain and have the update sent to Twitter and Facebook!  I can’t find a simple way to make those menial tasks happen any longer.

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Hating on the Intrusive New Twitter t.co Shortener

Who owns the URLs you submit to Twitter?  You?  Or the Bird?  I vote we should own our own URLs without having interference from the t.co Twitter link shortener unless we explicitly want it, and here’s why.  We use Bit.ly to shorten all Boles Blogs Network links we send to Twitter and Facebook using our proprietary Boles.co URL.  Yesterday, in the sidebar of our network blogs, the t.co link began to appear even though we were submitting the boles.co shortened URL to Twitter.

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Boles.co and Bitly.Pro Craft Historic Links

I discovered Bitly.Pro the other day, and I can’t believe I missed the early beta invitation to join the free program that gives you your very own personal link-shortening URL.  I sent in a request to be added to the beta program and in three days I received my welcome letter!

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I Live in Colombia and Montenegro

I am a collector of fun internet domain names, and if a new top-level domain becomes available, and if I’m in a funky enough mood to grab it, I can stake a new claim of life in a country beyond the borders of the USA.  I recently purchased Boles.co and Boles.me as new pointers to my main Boles.com domain.  Bite.me was already registered.

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Sharia Law and Censoring NSFW Link Shorteners

Are you offended by the image below of a bare-knuckled woman with naked arms drinking from a Beck’s beer bottle?  vb.ly is a link shortening service that takes NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content and “safe-ifies” it by giving an SFW — Safe(r) For Work — link to click.  Unfortunately, for vb.ly, the “.ly” domain belongs to Libya, and Libya is a country that adheres to Sharia:  Islamic Law — and Libya doesn’t want any booze-holding, tatted chicks riding their domain anywhere near NSFW territory.

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