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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Correct, bit.ly knows all the most popular links on Twitter in real time. This is worth a ton, or at least it could be.

To who? How do you package that up and sell it to someone?

Think: pulling that data into a techmeme.com style aggregator/ranking site for the most popular urls people are linking to. Imagine how dynamic it would be - things that got linked to the most would percolate up to the top. you could watch in near real time as news breaks and gains traction.

I've had a service like this in mind for a while and haven't pulled the trigger because I'm a chronic procrastinator.

That's a cool idea. However, it's still basically an advertising business unless you're charging for access to that site. And all of a sudden you have introduced a big incentive for people to spam/game your service.

I guess what I'm getting at is... some data is valuable, but doesn't, at least to ignorant me, seem to have a market for it.

(Edit: BTW, I'd be happy to be proven wrong... for instance, I have this site where the data might be worth something, and the ads aren't worth much:

http://shoplist.dedasys.com/ )

There's an important distinction to make between "advertising business" and "data business." Data can be useful for advertising, but can also be useful for tons of other stuff--news, filtering, etc.

Lots of services do this for Twitter already: http://twitturly.com, http://twitturls.com, http://www.tweetmeme.com,...

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