A little over a year ago we launched RefTagger. Since launching, RefTagger has been installed on thousands of sites and helped bloggers and site owners engage readers with the text of the Bible.
The other day we began talking about how cool it would be to have something like RefTagger, only for Twitter. A couple emails, a designer, and one developer later, we launched ref.ly.
Ref.ly is a URL shortening service with a twist. Simply go to ref.ly, type in a Bible verse, and a custom link is automatically generated that you can use to link your friends and followers to the Bible. The added beauty of ref.ly is that the URL structure is really easy to remember, so you can simply create the link on your own. In fact, ref.ly recognizes almost every conceivable Bible referencing scheme, so you can share Matthew 16:18 as http://ref.ly/Mt16.18, http://ref.ly/Mat16.18, http://ref.ly/Matt16.18, or http://ref.ly/Matthew16.18.
Along with an easy to remember structure, you also have the ability to share a single verse (http://ref.ly/Ro8.28), a range of verses, (http://ref.ly/Jn1.1-18), a chapter (http://ref.ly/Ps23), or an entire book (http://ref.ly/3Jn). You can even specify a particular version by simply adding @ followed by the version abbreviation (http://ref.ly/1P2.2@ESV).
With ref.ly you can now help your Twitter followers and Facebook friends engage more deeply with scriptures you reference in your updates.
ref.ly – To the point.
You guys rock! This is so handy, I'm going to tweet it right now!
Two notes to enhance functionality and expand usage:
1) Since you let users pick the version, it would help to list out the choices and their abbreviations. I wanted to use NRSV but couldn't figure it or see if it existed until I tested a passage and looked at the choices.
2) Make clear in the publicity that there are multilingual versions avaialable (Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Russian, and some I don't recognize) to broaden the audience.
This is a excellent idea and will use it on twitter!