FastCompany

Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist, Bitly, whos next, next You might think of Bitly simply as a service that shortens links for your Twitter feed. But to Hilary Mason, the company's chief scientist, Bitly is building a fresh new way to know what's going on in the world."We're able to learn things from the Bitly data set that people have never been able to share before," says Mason. "What is the half life of a link? How long will people be able to pay attention to it? What percent of links being shared on the web right now tend to be about the weather?" The company--which shortens 80 million URLs every day--is working on a trove of new ways to mine that data. With its new search technology, for instance, it's studying and classifying every URL it shortens to index the most viral content on the web. The company recently rolled out a reputation monitoring service based on this data, which the company says acts as an "early warning system, designed to alert you in realtime to swings in volume and sentiment related to specific keywords," ... From: FastCompany Views: 912 5 ratings Time: 03:42 More in People & Blogs