Eric Schmidt is stepping down from his position as CEO. This move will take effect April 4, 2011, when he will be replaced by Google’s co-founder Larry Page.

Reports say Larry Page will take charge of the day to day operations as CEO, and Co-founder Sergey Brin will be focussing on strategic projects including development and new products. Schmidt will be taking the role of Executive Chairman, and his focus will be on partnerships, business relationships, government outreach and technology. Given Google’s global reach, it looks like Google believes Schmidt’s focus in these areas will become increasingly important.

Would you like to know EXACTLY how many visitors your competition is generating via certain links, and even where the traffic is coming from?

If you leverage Twitter, you have likely seen bit.ly, which is one of the most popular URL shortening services in the industry. What you probably don’t know, though, is that they also publish full link traffic reports right on their site. And, the reports are accessible for everyone, even your competitors.

To get to a report, simply add a “+” sign to the end of the bit.ly URL. For instance, you can access the report for “http://bit.ly/2MHiQS”, by entering “http://bit.ly/2MHiQS+” in your address bar. This will provide a full link report listing total number of clicks, time of the clicks, click location, the referring site, the number of “Retweets”, the number of “Facebook Shares”, the number of “Likes”, the number of comments and more.

Would you like to know how much traffic Mashable gets from Twitter? All you have to do is go to their stream – http://twitter.com/mashable and place a “+” at the end of any of their bit.ly links.

Now go try it for some of your competitors. The sneak peek at their data might provide some benefit as you plan your next article, ad or promotion.