

 Twitter URL Service Bit.ly Says No to Ads, Yes to Data-Mining News - aditya
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/07/twitter-url-service-bitly-says-no-to-ads-yes-to-data-mining-news/

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jasongullickson
It's refreshing to see a company looking for a more creative way to generate
revenue than simply slapping advertising on as an afterthought.

The idea of using this data to build a news site is brilliant, and adds to the
usefulness and quality of the service instead of detracting from it or adding
complexity. Bravo.

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axod
It's genius! Instead of slapping advertising on, you build a news site. Hmm
wait a minute, how does the news site make money again?

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brandnewlow
Yeah, seriously. How do they make money? Selling the news back to other sites?

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ryoshu
They make money by aggregating the activity and doing real-time and historical
analysis. People will pay very good money for those things, especially with
the size of the datasets bit.ly has at its disposal.

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axod
>> "People will pay very good money for those things, especially with the size
of the datasets bit.ly has at its disposal."

Who? Why will they pay good money for it? How do they get a ROI?

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andrewbadera
Marketers, mostly. Researchers, a little bit.

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chime
> "... We were able to see the Neda video out of Iran trending well before CNN
> linked it in, and we’ve begun to refine our capabilities there to be able to
> pinpoint stories like that." He said part of this technique involves looking
> for links being shared by unlike people, because that means they have
> universal appeal.

This is why I fell in love with computer science. I can already imagine the
use of a good shortest path algorithm combined with collaborative filtering
(Netflix competition-type algorithms) being used to tackle this problem in
real-time. You are given a unique url and 1000 twitter accounts that linked to
it. You also have the entire twitter-follower digraph. Now design an algorithm
to calculate the "universality" factor with the lowest Big O. Now do this 10k
times a second for 10k unique urls.

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brandnewlow
I have to point out that anyone who spends time on the web knew about that
video before CNN linked to it.

Reddit, Digg, Twitter itself....

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adamhowell
Twitter is what TinyURL has been waiting -- literally -- years for. And they
get their feet swept by a shorter domain and a couple extra features. Crazy.

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wmeredith
Whatever. URL shortening in and off itself is easy. TinyURL had nothing stolen
from them. The only thing that mattered about bit.lky was those extra
features.

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RyanMcGreal
_bit.lky_ I hope that spelling was intentional. :)

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jamesk2
The .ly TLD is Libya. Is it safe to use .ly domains like bit.ly does? Will
Libya just jack the domain name Cuba style?

