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Comment by aditya | Hacker News Reader

Negative much?

Bitly has massive amounts of data on what people are clicking on, and there's some serious data crunching to be done to tune things like content recommendation, etc.

Last month, Bitly saw 7 billion clicks on its links and currently supports 8500 white label partners.

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Size doesn't always mean clever. I just plugged an HDMI cable into my TV all by myself, it shifts more than 7Billion bytes/SEC to the screen.

Yeah, but it's more than sending a few 301s or plugging a cable, a better analogy would be that if you wrote a sophisticated algorithm to mine patterns out of those bytes to the tune of 7 billion whatevers per whatever and produce interesting results, then you could call yourself a digital signal processing scientist.

They're not just doing redirects, they're doing a lot of data science with exploring the statistics of what gets shared, clicked, etc.

That's right, and I suppose you don't give a lick of credit to the Chief Artist inside your television sifting through that data and drawing the picture on your screen, do you.

Just think about the availability constraints such service needs to comply with. I can't remember a bit.ly outage, and an outage would make half the Internet unhappy.

Same for spam filtering, automatic reporting using the "+" links etc. At some scale level keeping up any service becomes a nontrivial task.

So don't use it, we already have DNS. If anything "url shorteners" are a step backwards, at least www.whatever.com is human-readable. I simply don't believe that we have enough computing power to add another layer to visiting a website but not enough storage for everyones URLs. It's just a stupid fad. Here's the new one: http://arseh.at/ (real URL)

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