Time for a quick update. Days from the public launch of bit.ly, SwitchAbit had the distinct privilege of being on lifehacker.com (thank you!).

The amount of feedback has been mind boggling. Every comment is important and we try very hard to reply in a timely manner. But the truth is, it will take a few days to work our way through. I apologize for the delay.

In the meantime, please check out the great articles on http://lifehacker.com.

Jay

We have suspended posting of switchAbit and twittergram while we investigate problems surrounding requests to SimpleDB.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Jay

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.

6. Most important for professional applications, you can access all the data about each page through a simple XML or JSON interface. Example.

7. All the standard features you expect from serious url-shorteners.

And it’s just the beginning, we’re tracking lots more data so that as more URLs are shortened by bit.ly we’ll be able to turn on more features.

Twitabit now includes replies in the queued posts. This means that you can keep the conversation thread going even if Twitter is down. Dig that.

http://twitabit.com/

Jay

The switchAbit team loves Twitter. We love it so much that we can’t stop tweeting even if it’s down. That’s why we created twitabit.

Twitabit uses the store and forward technology developed for switchAbit to queue your tweets and post when Twitter is back online. We’ve also integrated your history and replies thanks to our friends at Summize.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

http://twitabit.com/

* Developers will be interested in the Twitter compatible API. Add reliable store and forward posting to your application with little hassle.

Invitations have been sent to those who expressed interest in the switchAbit beta. A developer blog with disqus is available here for tech talk and support. We added some nifty graphs, so you can get insight into the operation of the service.

http://switchabit.tumblr.com

I’m testing tumblr integration.

Jay

Welcome to switchAbit. We’re opening up switchAbit for a special sneak preview. If you are interested in taking a look at what we’ve been up to, send us an email. We will still be sending out invitations to everyone who registered on beta.switchabit.com.

Details about how switchAbit works can be found in the online Help.

cheers,
Jay

The SwitchABit platform was developed because we noticed that an ever more complex flow of ideas and information is being facilitated by editorial systems and aggregators such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Ustream, YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, Disqus, WordPress, Tumblr, TypePad, Blogger, etc. And it’s not likely to get any simpler over time, rather people are going to want to connect more apps together, with more flexibility and therefore more complexity.

So we developed a platform to make it easy to set up these complex relationships. The focus has been on power with maximum ease of use. It’s called SwitchABit, and it will go to private beta sometime in the next couple of weeks. We’ll have a signup page where you can let us know you want to work with us on getting it smoothed out and ready for massive consumption.

In the meantime, to prove that it’s working, we’ve adapted two of my early Twitter-related apps, both on the Twittergram domain, to run on the SwitchABit platform. The first of these is ready for people to use — the Flickr-to-Twitter functionality. If you’re already a Twittergram user, you can go to the original setup page, and look for the yellow box with the picture of the friendly postman, and click on the link to be taken to the new site. Fill in the form, validate your account, and give it a whirl.

It should be every bit as reliable as the original service (maybe more so) and quite a bit faster. It’s also designed to scale to work for hundreds of thousands of users, Murphy-willing.

Anyway — wish us luck — the journey begins today. We hope you come along for the ride!

Hi. I am not worried about the content of this post because it is a test and will eventually scroll off.

Jay