Quite by chance, I noticed this on my bit.ly settings page earlier today – bit.ly domain tracking:
What it does is allow you to register a verified domain, and get crude stats back about the number of people clicking through bit.ly shortened links for that domain.
I registered blog.ouseful.info, verifying it via a CNAME DNS entry with my domain name provider (easily,co.uk), and then spent a bit of time hunting for the stats. I eventually found them via a drop down element on the Analyse page:
I don’t think you can get this data via the API, but there is a way of doing OAuth API connections, so I might see if I can grab whatvever data is available for my account via the bit.ly API into Google Spreadsheet using a tweak of this Google spreadsheets/OAuth recipe.
It’s still not a replacement for BackType of course – I can’t get Twitter IDs of folk who have shared shortened links to my domain, (nor even a list of people who have shortened links to my domain?), but maybe that’s in the pipeline? Or maybe Twitter, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo will buy up bit.ly and shut down what useful services it currently offers…?
OUseful.Info, the blog... 