Peter Stern, Bitly's (now-former) CEO. (linkedin.com)

Sometimes Silicon Alley can make your head spin: out of the blue, in a terse blog post, Bitly just announced  that CEO Peter Stern has resigned in order to "pursue other interests."

Say what?

The announcement, which clocked in at a mere 61 words, had just this to say about Mr. Stern's tenure:

“Peter has been a key leader and contributor to the Company,” said Bitly Board member Sam Mandel. “In particular he has been instrumental in transforming Bitly into a successful business while growing its unparalleled data set. We are very happy that he will remain a shareholder and supporter.”

After a lengthy effort to raise funds, the company announced a $15 million round from Khosla Ventures in July, bringing its total raised to $28.5 million.

When Twitter got into the link-shortening business, Bitly insisted its strength was really in metadata. Concurrent with fund-raising, the company was working on a revamp that focused more on getting consumers to subscribe.

This January, Bitly debuted three new social data APIs and better search functionality. Chief data scientist Hilary Mason promised: “You can expect to see much better stats for consumers that will draw off of this data, as well as better discovery tools on the enterprise side and audience analysis tools.” The company's revenue depends on selling insights from consumers to enterprise clients.

We've reached out to Mr. Stern for comment and will update if we learn anything more.

UPDATE: Betabeat has heard that the reason for Mr. Stern's departure was related to a difference of opinion. According to a source familiar with the company, Mr. Stern was interested in moving Bitly more toward an ad-tech business. There are a number of ad-tech companies interested in using insights about sharing and consumer intention as an extra edge in arbitraging data sets.

However, Bitly's management team and board felt that approach ignored Bitly's growing data trove and its potential as a social media platform for data analysis. As Bitly noted in a blog post just yesterday, the company has been "nearly 100 billion human beings clicking on bitly-powered links."

Mr. Mandel, a longtime Bitly board member and former EVP of business operations at Tweetdeck, will act as interim president, with Ms. Mason and Peter Miron, SVP of engineering at Bitly, rounding out the company's key players. They will move forward in trying to monetize the metadata Bitly collects in a way that makes sense for consumers and brands. Their goal will also be to accelerate launching new products.

According to the source, Bitly sees itself as part of the social infrastructure in large part because of its 20,000 to 30,000 API partners, like The New York Times, Amazon, Foursquare, and even the U.S. government.

Ms. Mason

We've expected some big (data) developements from Bitly since the New York startup announced a $15 million Series C led by Khosla Ventures July. Today, chief data scientist Hilary Mason is finally ready to show you what they're working with, empirically speaking.

The company announced the launch of three new data APIs that will radically boost the utility of the service for consumers and business clients. And it's not even your birthday, data nerds!

There's a real-time search API, open to any Bitly user. The company is also opening up an API for content analysis and a "bursting phrases" or "attention spikes" API that functions sort of like Twitter's "trending topics." Obviously APIs are geared toward third-party developers to incorporate into their products and build complimentary applications. However, any Bitly user can play around with some of that new-and-vastly-improved functionality using a demo interface at rt.ly.com. "We're data hackers, not UI designers," Ms. Mason warned us, but the site is very user-friendly.

Go to rt.ly and you'll find a number of filters that let you search all Bitly links by city, social network it was shared on, key words, languages, and even topics. You can also "create a story" for a particular search, like our favorite subject "Eric Schmidt," [see below]. That pops up a report with a map showing click rate, the geographical distribution of readers, link referrers, related stories, top domains, and more. "People who are really social web savvy have been using this already to discover the kind of content they might want to share or if they are writing content to see how it’s being distributed," she told Betabeat by phone.

It's obvious after spending some time on rt.ly that Bitly thinks about search differently than your standard Google query. "Our search lets you do things like describe the criteria you’re interested in and then just see what’s popular in that subset right now. An example--and one that I like to show off--is links about the topic food being clicked statistically disproportionately from Brooklyn. So you get a lot of the artisanal pickle style stuff and restaurant reviews."

Bitly's search function is also distinguished by its emphasis on real-time. "There’s the stream and we just sort of let you filter it and watch content pop in as it becomes popular and drop out as people stop paying attention to it," she said.

The interface also lets users peek at the content Bitly analyzes on the other side at the other side of its shortened link. "We do things like pull out the key phrases in that content and pull out the topics," she said.

The "bursting phrases" API is a even more complex. "Basically we calculate the click rate across all of Bitly's data on every web page containing any significant phrase in every language that we track," she said. "What that lets us do is look for the phrases that are getting a disproportionate amount of attention right now." It's sort of like Twitter's trending topics, she explained, in that, "we can tell you what people are paying attention to that we did not expect based on historical behavior."

Some of the data revealed by the new social APIs will start to show up on Bitly.com, she said. "You can expect to see much better stats for consumers that will draw off of this data, as well as better discovery tools on the enterprise side and audience analysis tools."

Ms. Mason didn't seem anxious about Twitter's sudden zeal for cracking down on third-party apps. "We’re always concerned about it but because of the way Bitly works--you wrap the link in a Bitly link before you share it on Twitter--we haven’t had to deal with any of those issues," she said. Even after Twitter started shortening links, 30 percent of all links shared on the service are still powered by Bitly. The company powers around 30,000 different domains for people. "The examples we usually give are the New York Times, the Dalai Lama, and Mariah Carey on the celebrity side," she added. "So it’s not all bit.ly links by a lot."

Besides, she noted, Bitly isn't all about Twitter. "We see almost the same amount of data for Facebook as well." Any links shared privately, however, won't be exposed by the API.

Developers chomping at the bit to work with Bitly's API will have a chance at a hackathon at its office next week, although the exact dates and times haven't been around.

If all this data is too much for you to handle, you can always take the old school approach, as Ms. Mason reminded us. Add a plus sign to any Bitly link and it takes you to a stats page for just that article.

Mr. Stern (Photo: LinkedIn)

Bitly CEO Peter Stern, who once told Betabeat he's been in the process of raising funds ever since he joined the company, finally has a milestone to announce. The company has raised a $15 million Series C led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures.

"[Mr. Kholsa] has been fascinated with the growth of Bitly all along," Mr. Stern said by phone this afternoon. "Fascinated with this kind of invisible glue that enables people to share in social media and the insight that you can extract from doing that at scale and thinking about what kind of services and products you can offer consumers to grow that set even more."

Mr. Stern said he has been in contact with Mr. Kholsa for a while. A Series C has been expected since Bitly raised a $1.4 million convertible note in March. Previous investors RRE and OATV also participated in this round.

The round is focused exclusively on Bitly's consumer offerings, Mr. Stern said. "On the business-side we continue to have record month over record month, but this raise is not about the B2B side. This raise is about giving us the runway to grow Bitly as a consumer service much faster than cash flow would allow."

In May, Bitly released a major redesign--transforming its utilitarian link-sharing and tracking service into more of a consumer-focused curation and discovery platform. (Some kind of expansion was expected after Twitter announced automatic link shortening with t.co last year.) The Internet lashed back--as it is wont to do--with a hair-trigger criticism; Bitly swiftly responded, reinstating its one-click link shortening.

It seems the redesign gamble has paid off. Since the end of May, daily consumer registrations have increased by 300 percent. "I think we made Bitly more relevant for a wider set of people," Mr. Stern said.

But don't expect him to gloat with vindication, at least not to a reporter. "The backlash was very regrettable because we love our customers and we changed a lot on them on a Tuesday morning after Memorial Day," he said. "But if you look at the tweets you’ll see a lot of the people who originally tweeted [their disapproval] a few seconds later tweeted that they actually liked what Bitly was doing." Hmm, we must've missed those ones!

Bitly monetizes exclusively with a paid option for business customers, not advertising. The long-term plan, said Mr. Stern, has stayed the same: "Grow Bitly as a consumer service where people use it to collect and share and organize content--and from that massive set of interactions, find actual insights that we can package and sell to business who understand what audiences are interacting with."

Even with just two product people and a few sales people dedicated to the enterprise side, the B2B front has still managed record record sales for the past three or four months, "with its very exciting and interesting, but not rapidly growing product," he said.

The Series C will be spent on hiring to help Bitly build more consumer products. "And we’re gonna buy a giant statute of me!" said Mr. Stern. "No, just kidding. Total joke."

(seedcamp.com)

We have to hand it to Bitly--instead of recoiling from the massive outpouring of distaste for its new redesign, the link-shortener-turned-social-network has translated user feedback into site design action. The company already responded to user complaints with bitmark revamps last week, but in a post on its blog today, Bitly announced that it has reinstated easier link shortening, effectively squashing the majority of complaints users had about its redesign. That means you, Roger Ebert.

According to the Bitly blog:

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. Now, when you paste a link into the “Paste a link here…” box at the top of the page, it will be instantly saved when you paste it (no second click needed)— and the shortlink will be right there ready for you to copy.

Less clicking! That's all an avid Internet user can really ask for, right?

IFTTT allows users to create tasks so that if something happens, the service will do something else. So you could set an IFTTT to get an email when it rains, or receive an alert whenever someone specific tweets. The bitly integration makes it possible to automatically tweet any link you shorten (that is, provided you've figured out how to shorten links on the new bitly).

Already popular: saving starred Google Reader items as private Bitmarks and sharing Bitmarks on Tumblr. By God, you will learn to use Bitmarks and, what's more, you will learn to love and appreciate them.

Only tangentially related: We kinda miss the hapless-looking old puffer fish. Who is this smiley new guy?

UPDATED: Turns out there's a kink worth mentioning. This reporter's Twitter just spat out a Bitmark for a National Geographic article regarding puffer fish. Presumably, this is the sample Bitmark awaiting every new bitly user, and when we created our IFTTT task to test all the aforementioned processes, out popped the puffer, thereby inspiring at least one fellow Betabeat writer to burst out laughing at our sudden, random taste for nature reporting.

(agbeat.com)

Link sharing service Bitly angered the Internet earlier this week with a convoluted redesign that obscured one of its most favored functionalities, URL shortening for Twitter. Even Roger Ebert was really mad about it, and if anyone is an accurate portrayal of the zeitgeist, it is clearly him.

Following the debacle, Bitly took to its blog to defend itself against the hoards of furious Internet types, writing, "We’ve clearly heard the concerned feedback of our users who were used to the old bitly and relied on our service for daily usage....We’ll continue to quickly iterate based on what we hear from all of you, so keep the feedback coming!"

Actually acting on user feedback is typically a sign of a successful startup, so we were happy to see that Bitly already addressed some of the UI gripes its users had. For example, it already added an automatic place to grab the shortlink when you add a new Bitmark, instead of having to blindly click around the site a million times to find it.

Still, we're no UI experts, but we're guessing the new Bitly redesign wouldn't be described as 'intuitive,' since they also took the blog post as an opportunity to explain how to use the site. Hint: if you have to take the time to define new terminology and demonstrate to users how to do something that was previously an easy part of your functionality, you're probably doing it wrong.

Luckily Bitly seems to be very responsive to user feedback. "This is just the first of many changes and enhancements we’re making in the coming days and weeks," they write.

But the blog post's commenters weren't satisfied with this explanation. Retorted one user: "Your site was simple, easy to use and great. Now it['s] just a hot mess."

How does that fish keep up his spirits in times like these? (theworstkeptsecret.com)

New York-based Bitly is determined to establish itself as more than just a link shortening device and today unveiled a redesign to position itself as a bookmarking tool. Unfortunately, it's been a terrible flop so far, at least according to the reactions on Twitter. Some were intrigued by the souped-up analytics and sharing mechanisms, but people who were used to navigating over to Bitly for a split second just to shorten a link were annoyed by the unnecessary changes. Even Roger Ebert was pissed! See for yourself.

Bitly links are now "bitmarks."

New York-based link shortening service Bitly just launched a major redesign that emphasizes link sharing similar to Twitter or the once-popular bookmark service Delicious.

The old Bitly centered around shortening links and publishing them to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Log into the new Bitly and you'll see something that looks more like a social network itself. You'll see a stream of your own share-worthy links and a separate stream of links from your network. Bitly is now calling these shortened links "bitmarks," a souped-up version of bookmarks.

You can write in a title and a note for each bitmark, which is automatically saved. You can make each bitmark public or private. Bitmarks can also be saved together in "bundles," which can be collaboratively edited. You can then search all your saved bitmarks.

In the "network" view, bitmarks are displayed in reverse-chronological order with titles, photos and descriptions. Bitly attributes the bitmark to the original source—Newsweek, for example, and even pulls the site's favicon. It also shows who shared the link. (More new lingo: Bitly users are now "bitizens," apparently.)

If your network is full of super-sharers, you may want to employ another one of Bitly's new tricks: the mute button, a function that is likely to be so appreciated that its existence alone could give Bitly a boost over Twitter.

Bitly is now a full-fledged link sharing service. The site has saved more than 25 billion links since 2008. "We want this to be the single best place for you to save and share your links and to discover interesting things from your friends and the entire web," the company said this morning.

The overhaul isn't a total surprise. The Verge reported two weeks ago that Bitly is raising a big round of funding, with new consumer products expected, and Bitly CEO Peter Stern confirmed to Betabeat that the company is in the process of raising money.

Peter Stern, Bitly's CEO (linkedin.com)

UPDATE 5/17: Bitly CEO Peter Stern reached out to Betabeat Thursday to dispute much of what was reported in The Verge yesterday. "While I would be delighted to report that we raised a significant amount of money, I’m not in a position to report that just yet," said Mr. Stern, who did acknowledge that he is in the process of raising funds, but said that has been true since he started his tenure as CEO. The company raised a $1.4 million convertible note in March.

Mr. Stern said Bitly is at work on a consumer product, but the company is not yet willing to discuss it. Last October, Bitly blogged about developing a real-time search engine that lets the company "see into the future." However, Mr. Stern said, "A Bitly revamp is in the works, but it doesn’t include a viral search, which is only available for business customers."

Link shortening service Bitly is moving up and out--literally and figuratively. According to The Verge, the company moved out of Betaworks' offices this week into its own space, and has also landed $20 million in new funding.

The Verge says the company:

is raising around $20 million in a new round of funding, we have learned from multiple sources. That's twice the amount the company raised in its last round, and shows a mature startup closing in on a working business model. We also hear Bitly is about to launch some new consumer products, including a real-time, viral search engine.

Despite the fact that Bitly is widely known as a link-shortening service, its main business revolves around a product that allows publishers to track link statistics across the web. Bitly has always had bigger aspirations for itself, primarily as a full-scale viral analytics platform, so the move to build a real-time, viral search engine dovetails nicely with that vision.

Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.