Just picked up on the new Bit.ly service and it looks to be very cool indeed. On the face of it, just another URL shortening application – enter in a long URL and get back a short version to embed in emails, blog posts or whatever. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find lots of loveliness lurking.

For example you can add your own keyword and create your own shortcut URL (e.g. http://bit.ly/redmusic). I know that class leader TinyURL has just done this, but it’s still nicely implemented. But much more significantly, the service also stores the last 15 of your shortcuts and in an awesome piece of neatness also gives you info on the number of click-throughs and traffic sources for your shortcuts. Data which you can use elsewhere via a simple unstyled XML feed.

All in all this is a very nice application. Of course the huge question mark over these shortcut services is whether they can last over time. If they don’t then a huge chunk of the web archives risks being lost to broken links. However the tech behind this newcomer – they’re using Amazon S3 as the storage farm – makes it look as though it could have legs, and certainly the feature set is superb enough to warrant a lot of interest and use from the media, netheads and businesses alike. More at ReadWriteWeb.

 http://bit.ly/ is a URL-shortener with lots of new stuff designed for an app developer who needs everything and more! :-) 1. History — we remember the last 15 shortened URLs you’ve created. They’re displayed on the home page next time you go back. Cookie-based. 2. Click/Referrer tracking — Every time someone clicks on a short URL we add 1 to the count of clicks for that page and for the referring page. 3. There’s a simple API for creating short URLs from your web apps. 4. We automatically create three thumbnail images for each page you link through bit.ly, small, medium and large size. You can use these in presenting choices to your users. 5. We automatically mirror each page, never know when you might need a backup.