So what’s beyond social networking and microblogging? Some speculate it might URL-shortening, mostly because of sheer practicality. A new type of metrics URL-shortners offer also make them attractive topic, though nobody’s quite that sure just yet.
Dave Winer
Take Dave Winer. Investors were confident enough in its future to throw $2 million worth of venture capitalism its way, and they did so despite it holding a far distant second place in the burgeoning URL-shortner market.
TweetDeck, a popular Adobe Air application for organizing Twitter (and other social) streams.
Secondly, Bit.ly offers ever valuable data. It remembers the last 15 URLs a user creates, stores them on a personal homepage, tracks clicks and referrals, automatically mirrors each page, automatically creates thumbnails for linked-to pages, and makes the data accessible via XML or JSON interfaces.
Assuming the transparency problem is never solved (and one imagines it will have to be eventually), the clickability of a link might reflect the influence of the person providing it, rather than a real measure of popularity. Others suggest this is remedied by measuring how viral a link is: if it spreads, it’s popular.
Market share aside, Bit.ly’s at least got geek credibility and enough bean-counter credibility to grab some funding. The next step may be to hope Qaddafi doesn’t take it over because of violations to Lybian or Islamic law; .LY domains are owned and
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