Figurin’ out what is getting shared, when, and where. This your life. (You know you love it!)

It’s important to somewhat learn each major social platform’s API/set of social gestures so you can see what’s working and what’s not. (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, etc)

But an appealing thing about Bit.ly is that in “one go,” you can do some decent sampling to see what’s up with The Day in Sharing (across the social web, per topic), among other things.

This class is free, people.

bitly:

At bitly, we strongly believe in open APIs and want to make it as easy as possible for you to build awesome stuff. Today we’re excited to announce a partnership with Codecademy that will help newbie and expert developers alike use our API. Codecademy teaches the basics of programming and how to build great companies, products, and applications, and now has classes designed by the API experts themselves (the people from the companies that have developed these open APIs for you to use). Our new API class, ‘Getting Started with bitly’ will make getting started coding on top of our API super fast. 

Wondering what we’ll be teaching you in these classes? You’ll learn how to use bitly for sharing links and seeing how they spread across the social web, and about the new social data and API endpoints that we launched yesterday. Our new Codecademy course will go over how to accomplish the following using our APIs:

• How to shorten a link

• Find the number of clicks on a link

• Find the sites sending traffic to a link

• Find the category of a page

• Search the social web for interesting links

We hope you dive right in. For full API documentation check out our dev site. Send your questions, comments and ideas to api@bitly.com. We can’t wait to see what you make! 

“Search requires that you know what you’re look for, but maybe you just want to see what the world is paying attention to.”

bitly:

Dear developers and data lovers,

We’re incredibly excited to announce the public release of a new social data API! Every day millions of people shorten, share, and click on links via bitly’s services. This API gives you direct access to the best available content shared by people across all social networks.

There are three kinds of functionality you can now access:

True Realtime Search

Run a query and get back the top URLs and stories for that query right now. Queries can be specific phrases, like “obama”, or filtering criteria, like “stories about food being read by people in Brooklyn”.

Attention Spikes

Search requires that you know what you’re look for, but maybe you just want to see what the world is paying attention to. Our bursts API returns the current phrases that are receiving a burst in attention beyond what we would expect. For example, “giant squid” is bursting today because of this story: Giant Squid Captured on Film. Bursts automatically aggregates multiple articles about the same thing together, which you can see on the realtime story pages.

Metadata about URLs

Finally, we do quite a bit of analysis on the content of each URL. You can now query on a URL basis for keywords, topics, content, language, and location relevance. Generating this kind of metadata is difficult problem faced by anyone who wants to build an application on links. We’ve solved it, now there’s no need for you to!

Full documentation is available on our dev site and in our Python library, and if you’re in New York stay tuned for our API LAUNCH HACKATHON next week in our office. Send your questions, comments and ideas to api@bitly.com!

Extreme Makeover, Digg Edition happened today.

As of now, there are no comments. Just weighted/voted “top” stories. I’m trying to figure out how they determine “Top” and “Popular.” It seems to be weighted/seeded as much by a story’s Twitter activity as by its own internal Diggs (votes). Even if it isn’t, Twitter shares are certainly prominently displayed. (Facebook activity is displayed, too, but it’s pretty empty for most of the stories compared to Twitter activity).

[update: According to TechCrunch and The Verge , the new Digg does use Twitter and Facebook to determine top stories:

Digg’s new algorithms now also look at signals from Twitter and Facebook

…Betaworks also says that it’s changed the Digg score to take social sharing from Facebook and Twitter into account when ranking stories.]

Another thing- a story shows the Twitter avis of people sharing the link, regardless of whether they’re Digg users.

Below you’ll see a screenshot that displays my Twitter avi (among others), despite the fact that I’ve yet to register for Digg. (Unaware of Digg, I shared the story on Twitter.)

So yeah. Very Twitter-aware.

Then… paradoxically, it requires Facebook auth to sign-in. Betaworks are total Twitter-heads (my people!), and anticipating the FB-auth backlash, they assure us in their FAQ that requiring Facebook is an anti-spam measure, and will soon allow other ways to sign-in

Part of me wonders if it’s as much about preventing spam as it is about just getting the site up and running (respect!). After all, you can submit a link without Facebook auth:

#sideeye

Whatevs, they got it up and running. Right on. Even if this doesn’t “fix” Digg, they have nothing to lose by trying crazy stuff. Too many once-popular sites ride a slow-descent, scared of alienating their existing/decaying users. Cool to see a site-in-crisis try something for its future users.

rethinkdigg:

On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.

While today’s launch is a milestone for us, we’re more excited about what’s coming next. In the subsequent weeks and months we will:

introduce network-based personalization features (like we do in News.me) to make Digg a more relevant and social experience

experiment with new commenting features

continue to iterate Digg for mobile web

move the website forward with features like the Reading List, different views into the top stories on Digg, and more data to help users better understand why a particular story is trending

launch an API so that members of the development community can build all the products that we haven’t even thought of yet

For anyone who may have questions about what’s going on and where we plan to head, we’ve put together an FAQ. We’d appreciate any feedback.We’re proud of what we’ve built over the last month and a half, but today is just the beginning. Hello world, welcome to v1.