You can add another name to the pool of URL shortening services – Cligs. This service performs the same basic routines that others perform, but with analysis on the links you’ve created. It’s got a pretty decent set of analysis tools including referrer statistics, search engine bot sightings, social media mentions, and hits per day. It’s comparable to BudURL which is currently free, but not for long.

One thing Cligs does that others don’t do is allows a user to create multiple cligs per destination URL. If you went to TinyURL and entered http://microblink.com/, everyone who entered that would get the same URL back. With Cligs, you can create multiple short URLs for the same destination and seed them to different sources. For instance, if you create one for Facebook and one for Twitter, you’ll be able to see if those two paths ever cross. This helps you see the viral nature of links floating around the internet. If your Facebook link appears on Twitter, you know someone on Facebook is sharing it on Twitter.

Cligs currently lacks an API, which makes it somewhat worthless to me as I do almost all of my short URL creation through scripted tools. I’ve heard the API is coming this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to start using it for analytics when I farm out updates using mu. For the time being, there’s a bookmarklet you can use when you create your account.

For more info, follow @cligs on Twitter

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