Business

Today Bitly announced a new Bitly Labs project called Realtime, a service for finding the most clicked on Bitly links. Realtime, now in private beta, allows users to filter searches by social network, keyword, subject and more. For example, here are the results for a search for the keyword “startups” in technology on Twitter: As you can see, it’s not perfect yet (why is that article on hidden Mountain Lion features being displayed on a search for startups?). But with Bitly’s traction in URL shortening, this could become the go to reference for trending articles and sites. Bitly has been working on expanding its business beyond URL shortening in recent months and announced a new round of funding lead by Khosla Ventures earlier this month. In May the site launched a controversial redesign that recast the service as a bookmarking service rather than just a URL shortening service, and in January it launched an updated version of its enterprise dashboarding service. But the really big ide...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More On the heels of a deal with Facebook to promote Olympic conversations on NBC’s Facebook page, the broadcast network today is taking one more step to improve its social standing during the big sports event. It is linking up with Storify, the social-media “story creator”, to put streams of real-time Olympic content, curated by NBC journalists, across Today.com as well as NBC’s 10 owned TV station websites. An NBC spokesperson tells me that this is by far the “biggest thing” that NBC has ever attempted with social media. NBC journalists — 40 in all that will be in London and elsewhere — will be mining con...