Bit.ly Plans News Service, Data Analysis

Posted on August 3, 2009

Wired reports that Bit.ly is going to launch a real-time news service that would show news trends and share which news stories are the most linked.

Bit.ly general manager Andrew Cohen tells Wired, "We're seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month. 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."

It would be interesting to see what the top shared bit.ly links are. It would compete in some ways with Twitter search but there are also a lot of tweets on Twitter that don't include URLs. There are also sites like Twitturls, Tweetmeme, and Twitturly that already provide data on the most popular links shared on Twitter.

The Wired story also says Bit.ly plans to added expanded fee-based analytical tools to marketers and business using its service.