The Web's Crystal Ball Gets an Upgrade

Thousands of people every day use the link-shortening service Bitly to tame unwieldy Web links to share on Twitter and other social media sites. Few realize that they're simultaneously helping the New York company peer into the Web's future.

Bitly analyzes the pages pointed to by the 80 million short links it generates every day to predict changes in the public's attitude toward people and companies. Now Bitly is set to get access to a slew of new data that could make its Web crystal ball even better at forecasting the future. Bitly has reached a data-sharing agreement with VeriSign, based in Dulles, Virginia. VeriSign acts as a kind of telephone directory for the Internet. Any address typed into a browser is sent to servers at VeriSign or one of a handful of other organizations, which help turn that URL into a numerical address that a computer can use to find the Web page it needs. VeriSign looks up over 50 billion URLs every day and, like Bitly, gets a handle on what people are doing online as a result. In particular, VeriSign's data could add an awareness of activity outside the social sites where Bitly links are used. Andrew Cohen, Bitly's general manager, wouldn't give details on what this would make possible, but says he will explore the possibility of using the data to improve his company's reputation-monitoring system. Even without VeriSign's help, Bitly can already predict when a company's reputation is about to take a dive.