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.
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.
At some point, they have to ask people for money. if they're not going to ask users for money, then they're just going to be another B2B business whose job is to sell stuff to other businesses, advertising or not.
> "... 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.
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.
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.
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.