Who doesn’t know about TinyURL, the popular URL shortening service that is used widely to share links over email, IM’s etc. Here is another URL shortening service launched by Betaworks that goes by the name of Bit.ly. It is still in its nascent stages but it will give a close competition to TinyURL with its advanced feature set.

• It uses cookies to save last 15 links you have shortened and displays them when you visit the home page. So, you must not delete the cookie if you want to use this feature.
• You can use your own custom keyword in the URL. For example, http://bit.ly/geekace will be redirected to http://geekace.com.
• It creates 3 thumbnails for pages that you used for URL shortening.
• It also tracks the number of clicks and referrers, so you can use this, to track the traffic you are getting & from where.
• There’s a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to any other web app.

It will dethrone TinyURL in the near future. Just give it a try.