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I think there is a huge indirect value for the owners to be derived from the data and trends it shows.



Correct, bit.ly knows all the most popular links on Twitter in real time. This is worth a ton, or at least it could be.


To who? How do you package that up and sell it to someone?


Think: pulling that data into a techmeme.com style aggregator/ranking site for the most popular urls people are linking to. Imagine how dynamic it would be - things that got linked to the most would percolate up to the top. you could watch in near real time as news breaks and gains traction.

I've had a service like this in mind for a while and haven't pulled the trigger because I'm a chronic procrastinator.


That's a cool idea. However, it's still basically an advertising business unless you're charging for access to that site. And all of a sudden you have introduced a big incentive for people to spam/game your service.

I guess what I'm getting at is... some data is valuable, but doesn't, at least to ignorant me, seem to have a market for it.

(Edit: BTW, I'd be happy to be proven wrong... for instance, I have this site where the data might be worth something, and the ads aren't worth much:

http://shoplist.dedasys.com/ )


There's an important distinction to make between "advertising business" and "data business." Data can be useful for advertising, but can also be useful for tons of other stuff--news, filtering, etc.


Lots of services do this for Twitter already: http://twitturly.com, http://twitturls.com, http://www.tweetmeme.com,...




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