URL shortners Part Deux: bit.ly TV collects viral videos, while goo.gl gest hacked for general use

Boy, bit.ly sure isn’t standing still. Soon after they introduced bit.ly Pro, here they are showing off their new toy – bitly.tv

In related news, goo.gl, Google’s URL shortner that used to be reserved for Google Toolbar and Feedburner users, can now be used as a generic URL shortener, though not officially.

Twitter’s default URL shortner bit.ly has launched its own Labs website, just like Google and Mozilla have for example. They don’t have quite as many projects in there, but they are off to a good start.

The first project in the bit.ly Labs is j.mp – practically the same as bit.ly but 2 characters shorter. Links are interchangeable (you can change “j.mp” for “bit.ly” in the URL and it still works), so all the statistics and tools for bit.ly still work as advertised if you got for the shorter JUMP variety.

The second entry, bitly.tv, taps into the collective mind of Twitter users to make a list of all the videos on the Internet that are popular right now. It’s similar to Twitter’s trending topics but for videos rather than topics. You can think of it as a viral video aggregator.

The videos come from a variety of sites, though most are from YouTube (surely because of its overwhelming popularity). But other videos from other sites are included as well – Photobucket, The Onion, Hulu, College Humor, and Daily Motion, to name a few.

The interface is simple – you get a grid of videos and you can see the title of the video if you hover over it with your mouse. A click launches the player, without redirecting you to the page itself. It also show tweets that link to the video and also helps you quickly share the video on Twitter, Facebook or by email.

Bitly.TV keeps the most popular videos from only the last couple of days and it seems as a great procrastination tool. Or in bit.ly’s own words they’ve been “Lowering worker productivity since 2009!”

As for goo.gl, it’s not (officially) open to the public at large yet, but that didn’t stop Alexandre Gaigalas from creating a handy page that lets you shorten any link.

And it works like charm – here’s a goo.gl link to our blog: http://goo.gl/0JCw. You can get it as a Google Chrome extension too. Neat!

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