What is "bit.ly" anyway?

And should you trust it? bitly (formerly bit.ly) is a URL shortening service owned by bitly, Inc., a betaworks company. It is especially popular on microblogging website Twitter because it was the default URL shortening service on the website since May 6, 2009, replacing TinyURL. Several competing services, such as Trim, shut down their services after they found that it was difficult to compete with bit.ly on Twitter. In addition to its main URL shortening service, the website provides tools to view statistics related to users that click on generated links. The company behind bit.ly launched a similar service, but for online videos to determine what videos are the most popular on the web. bit.ly announced October 12, 2010 that users can now automatically generate QR Codes that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically direct users to shortened links. bit.ly links never expire and cannot be changed once they are created for a site. URLs that are shortened with the bit.ly service use the bit.ly... Source: bit.ly on Freebase, licensed under CC-BY Should you trust the shortened links? That depends who made them. It is always best to know who is sending you a link before clicking -- the best defense is a good offense.