Learning to Bundle

Bit.ly, a site that lets people shorten and share links, recently added a new tool to its website. Users are now able to "bundle" URLs.

What does this mean? Here's an example:

I have created numerous videos during my internship with the Simpson College Athletics Communication Department. These videos have been placed on YouTube for people to view.

However, I want to share the links to a few of my videos on Facebook so my family can view them without searching on YouTube. Bit.ly lets me package the links together into one convenient URL.

How do you do this? It's really simple.

Type in a URL like you normally would in the "shorten your links" box on Bit.ly. Then, add a space and another URL.

You can keep doing this until you have the amount of links you want. Then, press "bundle."

One URL will be created. For the group of three links I wanted to share, my URL is: http://bit.ly/cPDOQw

This means, instead of sharing all of this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSsb6FXS-A8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPaeSM-_Luo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy8hDVVvZPM

Bit.ly shortens and bundles it to this: http://bit.ly/cPDOQw

Once the bundle is made, I can share it on Facebook.

Facebook isn't the only use for the Bit.ly bundle. It can be used on Twitter, where it would be extremely useful due to the limited amount of characters Twitter allows.

It can also be used in e-mail.

Journalist Jolie O'Dell of Mashable described the usefulness of bundling perfectly in her article "Bit.ly Introduces Bundles: Multi-Link Sharing With One URL":

"You can tweet a string of YouTube videos, e-mail all your Thanksgiving recipes, post a collection of study materials to Facebook – all with just one short URL."

Overall, this is a great new resource for link-sharing addicts.