Bitly's Mobile App Refresh

Apps are suppose to make your life easier, not more complicated. You really know when an app's UI has changed before opening the app when you notice that its app icon has changed. And, Bitly's changed from an outlined orange logo to a dark orange background with the outlined logo in white. Certainly a noticeable change.

In the old Bitly app for iPhone, you really didn't have to do much to save, shorten, and share a link. You could be in another browser or in an RSS reader app and the order of operations used to be simple with few steps:

In a browser or RSS reader, copy the link
Bitly's app would automatically recognize that a link was copied, and take both the Title of the link and the link itself, packaged together on a screen that would allow you to edit or insert a new Title (if needed), then share the link to one or all of your connected social media accounts.

It was:

Copy link / Bitly app automatically shortens / Share link

Now, it is:

Copy link
In the Bitly app, you now need to hit the + symbol to create a link (sadly no automatic detect)
Oops, no title at all. Go back to the browser and copy the title from the article
Go back to the Bitly app, edit the link and paste the title
Then, LEFT swipe (left to right) to share
But, sharing no longer brings up a list of your connected accounts, it just shows the default sharing options that the Chrome browser shows
Share / Scroll sideways through the list of options / Post

Alas, no more Bitly convenience for me. Looks like it is back to long URLs and the Feedly share button.

With Feedly, it's Share / Post, and you're done. No analytics. Twitter has some analytics but they're not terribly useful just yet.

Those 4 extra minutes every $5 reward cycle with Bing Rewards, I think I gain them back each time I don't use the Bitly app to share links.

Bitly's Dark Traffic

Saw this on my Bitly dashboard:

Bitly Tracks Dark Traffic

Looks like my top traffic channel is from the dark social web; or basically links that web analytics tools are unable to track. This is curious because I use Bitly almost exclusively as a link shortener on social media sites. At least Google Analytics knows what traffic comes from mobile, device type, or network source. Personally, it just reads like a bad programming error or laziness on the platform's part.

Bitly's blog suggests that 70% of all online referrals (source) come from dark social.

You'd think that if you shortened a link from a news source's native domain, that it would be easier to track. Or, even if you copied someone else's shared link and stripped out their tracking code, that Bitly would be able to track the comings and goings from your Twitter account to a hosted domain.

Alas, whatever Bitly is failing to track it is annoying. This is what I'd call junk analytics.