It's been a little over a week since popular URL shortening service Bitly released its first iPhone app and announced a major redesign of its web products, Chrome extension, and bookmarklet, but it seems some of its users are finding the new service lacking. Bitly just posted an update to its blog noting that it has been listening to the feedback it has gotten since launch and is making some changes to speed up the service's essential feature — shortening links. The "paste a link here" box on the homepage will now helpfully save your link immediately and provide one-click access to copy the shortlink for sharing.
Fortunately, it sounds like Bitly is also restoring some much-needed functionality to the bookmarketlet and Chrome extension — last week, they added extra steps to saving URLs because users had previously complained about savings too many links accidentally. However, for those hoping to grab a link and go without making a lot of clicks, it was a painful transition — but now Bitly is adding back an option to allow one-click save and shortening to speed the whole process back up. There's also a number of small bug fixes, as well as an updated iOS app that fixes iPad crashing and makes it easier to create an account without Facebook or Twitter. While we're glad to see Bitly responding quickly to user requests and complaints, we can't help but wonder if the new redesign is causing more trouble than its been worth so far. The updated homepage is live now, and the new extension and bookmarklet should be available in the next day.