Briefs

By Eliot Van Buskirk, July 31, 2009

When the world’s 20 million or so Twitter users click links in their feeds, most of the time, they’re routed through bit.ly’s URL shortening service, like sands through an hourglass. By channeling people through the service on their way to the rest of the web, Twitter has created a valuable opportunity to make its famously revenue-free service pay - which is probably why rumors continue to circulate about Twitter acquiring bit.ly, which raised $2 million earlier this year.

... When we raised the possibility of bit.ly serving contextual, interstitial advertisements between Twitter and the web - even for only one or two percent of outgoing links - Cohen said, flat-out, "I’m not going to do that."

Instead, he’s going to mine those links to create a real-time news service that would work somewhat like Twitter trends, except that it would track the hottest links rather than the most-used words. The result would be a Digg-like news service comprised of links determined to be important by bit.ly’s analysis engine.

"We’re seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month," said Cohen. "Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web. Sometimes that’s humorous stuff - the other day, the most shared video we saw on the web was William Shatner performing a dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s farewell address.

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