Speedier Shortening
We mean it when we say we've been reading all your tweets and emails. And we're listening! In the week since our release, we're already making adjustments, so that saving and shortening links in the new bitly is a whole lot easier.
Context & Ripple Effects
The new bitly launched on May 29 and immediately ran into trouble: TechCrunch's coverage of the backlash framed the redesign as a product drifting beyond link shortening that its users were 'not amused' by. This post is bitly's answer, nine days later — a direct acknowledgment that tweets and emails from users drove adjustments to saving and shortening links.
The story traveled unusually far for a changelog note, with pickups from VentureBeat, The Verge, GigaOM, Betabeat, Marketing Land, and WebProNews — evidence of how much attention the link-shortening space commands now that bitly has been pushing into broader territory since its Twitterfeed acquisition and enterprise social-search push.
First-order effects
- Users of the new bitly get faster saving and shortening within a week of launch, softening the sharpest complaint from the May 29 redesign reception.
Second-order effects
- The rapid rollback signals to observers watching bitly's expansion beyond shortening — including the enterprise social-search direction it staked out in October 2011 — that the core utility remains politically untouchable inside the product.
Third-order effects
- If this launch-then-patch cycle holds, major consumer web products will increasingly treat public reaction as their real testing phase, with redesigns shipped first and usability fixed in response rather than resolved before release.
The trend: Consumer web services are shifting from testing redesigns before launch to iterating them in public under immediate user pressure.