ReadWriteWeb

What do you drink when you're out at the bar? What do you brag about afterwards? If you're like a lot of Untappd users in the United States, they're not the same thing. At least that's what the data from Untappd suggests, according to lead developer and co-founder Greg Avola.

Avola spoke on February 1st in London at the Monki Gras. As part of a larger talk about Untappd and its growth, Avola talked about the aggregated data that the company has gleaned from user shares via the Untappd app.

New research from Bit.ly shows that people share more links about dogs than cats. Using their internal search engine, Bit.ly data scientists looked for the number of pages with content containing the term "cat" and "dog." They included the plural and any variations. While it's clear that dogs are the most popular animal on the Internet, the data shows that the majority of people want to cuddle multiple dogs at one time, whereas people would rather cuddle with one cat at a time. What makes people want to share links about dogs more than links about cats?

Our social Web is a busy, data-intensive place. Twitter sees 1 billion tweets in a week, Facebook now has 800 million users, and those are just the big players, neither of which was around eight years ago. The social Web is still relatively young, and growing.

Like the Web itself, baked into the heart of much of our social experience is the good, old fashioned hyperlink. The only difference is that the social Web requires shorter links, which simplifies them visually, but adds another technical layer between users and the content they're trying to access.

Link shortening and social web analytics provider Bit.ly announced today the first Enterprise product built on top of its new search platform, a reputation tracking alert system. Unlike other social media monitoring services, Bit.ly says it will predict which brand-new pages online will receive a lot of traffic in the future. Thus what Bit.ly's customers should pay attention to.

How does it do that? How well does it perform? Some information and initial impressions are below.

Matt LeMay, platform manager at Bit.ly, says that social data can tell us who we are – and who we want to be. Speaking at the Monktoberfest today in Portland, Maine, talked about some of the insights that Bit.ly gets from looking at sharing and click data for Bit.ly links. LeMay has learned that what people share isn't what they click on – and if you want followers, be a cat, not a chicken.

According to bitly, the half-life of a link isn't measured in weeks or days, it's about three hours on most social networks. Does it matter where the link is posted? Absolutely. For the most bang for your social media buck, YouTube is the winner.

The half-life of a link is the amount of time it takes for a link to get half the clicks it will ever receive. The company looked at the half-life of 1,000 popular bitly links posted to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to see whether it matters where a link is posted.

Twitterfeed, the popular tool for publishing links automatically to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, has been acquired by URL shortener Bitly. Both are loosely associated projects of seed investor and web tech incubator Betaworks, part of what Betaworks CEO John Borthwick calls a "glorious connected ecosystem of things we have going on here."

For Twitterfeed to move in-house with the analytics provider that is the basis of so much of its value makes sense. Twitterfeed itself has steadily added features in recent months though, from geocoding published messages to publishing into LinkedIn. Is it a good idea to automate publishing of links into social networks? The jury is still out on that one.

Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.

There was a time in the United States when anything that called into question moral clarity, the black and white of a clear perspective on right and wrong, was deeply distrusted - if not actively shut down. Seeing the world through other peoples' eyes was considered not an essential act of empathy but a slippery slope into drug use, homosexuality and communism.

Fortunately, brave pioneers of intellectual freedom helped us bust out of the 1950's and begin to appreciate the world in all its rich and painful complexity and subjectivity. As of today, with the launch of News.me on the iPad - there's now an app for that. (iTunes Link) A collaboration between the New York Times and the data wonks at URL shortener Bitly, News.me shows you the news from other peoples' perspectives - and other people are very different from ourselves! I have found it quite appealing to use for the last several months - it's been one of my very favorite ways to learn about the world using my iPad. Even before launch, hundreds of publishing partners are intrigued as well. It's a strikingly new model for both users and publishers.

News.me, the stealthy social news project being developed by Betaworks in conjunction with The New York Times, has just started accepting invite requests. As part of the partnership deal, The New York Times took an equity stake in Bit.ly, a URL-shortening service from Betaworks, the technology incubator behind several notable social Web companies, including Twitter dashboard TweetDeck, real-time analytics service Chartbeat and audience engagement platform SocialFlow.

How exactly Bit.ly will be used in the upcoming News.me service is still unknown, but we do know that it will debut in the form of an app for the Apple iPad. And now you can request to be first on the list to try it out.