Bitly Launches “Realtime,” An Attention Ranking Engine

Popular URL shortener and bookmarking tool bitly has announced “realtime,” an aptly named real-time discovery engine.  Realtime pulls in click data from a variety of social networks and allow searchers to view by topic, query, location, language or domain.

Realtime (URL is rt.ly) pulls in all posts from “across the bitlyverse” which allows users to see what is being clicked on now.   One of the most beneficial application of the service is showing what is happening on each social network including Twitter, Facebook, tumblr, ameblo and Linkedin.

Not only can you search a query across all social sites, but users can also see what specific articles are hot on specific networks.  Here’s a look at popular Olympic articles on Twitter (left) compared to LinkedIn (right):

You can see that on Twitter more folks were sharing Coach K doing Yoga and realtime scores while on LinkedIn the top story was about Olympians not having to pay taxes.

Users can also add articles directly to bitmarks, bitly’s bookmarking system.  If a user clicks on the blue icon next to the link title they will be escorted to the link analytics page:

Realtime is currently a bitly labs project and users must request access with their bitly account.  For more information see the bitly blog.