Bitly Launches New Bookmarking Features, Profiles, Search & iPhone App

Link shortener Bitly today launched a major redesign and number of new features that all add up to what the company itself calls “a new Bitly.” Among these new features are ‘bitmarks,’ Bitly’s name for its new bookmarking features, the ability to search and find these bookmarks, a fast search functionality, as well as enhanced public profiles that give users more privacy control. Bitly is also rolling out new bookmarklets, a Chrome extension and its first iPhone app.

Ever since its launch in 2008, Bitly has been a major part of the social sharing ecosystem on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Bitly’s users currently save about 100 million links per day and the company tells us that over 25 billion Bitly links have been created thus far. The company registers about 300 million clicks on its links every day – that’s about 1% of all clicks on the Internet.

The focus of today’s launch is clearly on giving its users more curation features. The new “bitmarks” allow you to easily go back and look at the links you’ve shared on Facebook and Twitter. You can also, of course, still organize these links into bundles – a feature the company introduced in 2010. With this release, Bitly also made organizing these bundles more collaborative and now makes it more obvious “that you can invite people to collaborate and edit a bundle with you.”

Bitly now also features a network view that lets you see the links your friends are sharing publicly on Twitter and Facebook.

Bitly stresses that this update is meant to make the services” the single best place for you to save and share your links and to discover interesting things from your friends and the entire web.”

Starting today, developers will be able to use Bitly’s open API to add these “bitmarking functionality” to their apps as well.

Here is the full list of Bitly’s updates:

Easily save, share and discover links — they’re called bitmarks, like bookmarks.
Instantly search your saved bitmarks.
Curate groups of bitmarks into bundles and collaborate on bundles with friends.
Make any bitmark or bundle private or public.
See what friends are sharing across multiple social networks, all in one place.
Save and share links from anywhere with our new bitmarklet, Chrome extension and iPhone app.