Bit.ly Celebrates Its Biggest Month Yet with 3.4 Billion Links Clicked

Despite the recent troubles, it’s still a pretty great time to build a service based on or catering to Twitter. A great example of this is bit.ly, Twitter’s ‘official’ URL shortener. The service just keeps on growing and posted record numbers again in March. And the service is about to get even better with the launch of bit.ly 1.3, scheduled to be rolled out this week.

“Over the coming week we are going to release bit.ly 1.3, a major release that includes a complete update to our web site and the addition of some nifty features such as history search. Alongside the new web site, we’re unveiling significant additions to our bitly.Pro product,” bit.ly announced on its blog.

“Links are shortened automatically once you enter them (a feature you can disable, if you prefer). And it’s even easier than before to create custom URLs and to share your short links on Twitter. The short story: it takes fewer clicks to shorten and share your URLs,” the announcement said.

The core service, the URL shortening, is now more streamlined and the process should be faster for users. There aren’t any revolutionary changes, but the tweaks should be very welcomed.

With bit.ly 1.3, the service is also introducing an interesting, new tool under the “Manage“ tab. The page serves as a history tool for all of your links shared with bit.ly. You can search through the archives and the search engine is smart enough to look at the context of the pages linked to in order to determine the most relevant results.

With the announcement, bit.ly also revealed some interesting statistics. 3.4 billion links shortened with bit.ly were clicked on in March, a significant increase over February’s 2.7 billion. A couple of days ago, the service also saw its busiest day yet with 147 million clicks. Considering that bit.ly processed 87 million links in the entire month of March last year, it’s a pretty big improvement.