You may have noticed that I did a little bit of tidying up on the site today, and in the sidebar I also added a list of my most recently shared links on bit.ly. Allow me to explain what this is, and why you might want to consider using it.

For a long time, I was using del.icio.us extensively to bookmark interesting links and then repost them here, but I kind of stopped using it after Twitter took over my life (and everyone else’s). As I mentioned not too long ago, Twitter has taken the place of this blog in a lot of ways, and I’ve been sharing my random linkage on there instead. The problem with Twitter is that the posts can only be 140 characters long, which has made URL shortening services essential. This is where bit.ly comes in.

Unlike a lot of the other URL shortening sites, bit.ly offers some cool additional features if you sign up for an account. It will store all of your recent links and give you a compact URL, but it can also track how many people have clicked on it, and it offers an API and RSS feed for your recent links. While it doesn’t allow you to enter tags or any additional information about the links like del.icio.us does (leading to some ugly and/or useless titles for the links), and it doesn’t have a full social network built-in as of yet, it can auto-post your links to Twitter and also back up the page you are linking to in case it gets overloaded with traffic or eventually goes away. Some people have suggested that it might have the potential to become the new Digg.

Either way, I’m going to start using bit.ly in basically the same way that I used del.icio.us previously, so if you want to see what I’ve been stumbling across on the web lately, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for my account, or just check out the sidebar of this site on a regular basis.