For those wondering wtf (like I did for a couple of minutes after clicking through), from http://bitlynews.com/about.html:

It works by automatically discovering bit.ly links on Twitter in real-time, then posting stories with high click activity on bit.ly. Each story's score is periodically updated with recent stats from bit.ly, so the most clicked-on stories bubble to the top.

Unless they are doing some clever filtering, this can be very easily abused.

It's already half garbage anyways. Recipes and fashion tips? Just what I always wanted!

Would be cool if things could be categorized somehow so I could only see the top stories being shared for things I actually care about. I realize this isn't really possible but one can dream.

I'm the developer of Bitly News.

One thing I'd like to add to the site is automatic categorization of links, like on Google News. If anyone has suggestions on how to accomplish that, please comment.

I'm also struggling with intermittent 502 proxy errors on the server where Apache has problems proxying to news.arc on localhost.

Re: categorization, would this solve your problem?

http://www.kosmix.com/corp/developer

That might work. I'll look into it - thanks.

Excellent job.

We can do that for you... http://www.newscred.com.

I'm personally very interested in this as well. Feel free to email me - shafqat at newscred dot com if you want me to put you in touch with our engineer directly.

You could look into the Open Calais API. http://viewer.opencalais.com/

Newsley uses it to categorize financial news items - http://newsley.com

I was working on a similar app but ran into issues getting enough of the twitter stream, what access to the Twitter API are you using (is this all from the gardenhose)?

Yep, just using the plain old Twitter search API via tweepy, with a search term of 'http bit.ly'.

There's an excellent chapter on automatic news article categorization in "Programming Collective Intelligence"

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321

Are you not struggling with finding "people" to talk there

alchemyapi does some basic categorization, but it can be expensive with a high volume.

Uses a version of news.arc vulnerable to the identity stealing problem described in http://xach.livejournal.com/228481.html

That's still the latest version of news.arc publicly available, though.

This just won the bit.ly api contest. Congrats to the developer(s), it looks great!

It would be REALLY awesome if it also scraped the text of each tweet (sans link) and converted it into comments on each thread. Identical tweets would translated into 'upvotes' on the comments.

This is great.

I also think this would be really cool, although I would make retweets the source of 'comment' upvotes.

Yes I was hoping for this. In fact, why limit yourself to Bit.ly links? You could literally index every link coming through Twitter. Future expansion: move from Twitter to all public links shared on the entire internet.

At first I tried indexing all links (not just bitly ones) but the volume of results was too much to keep up with. I'm just using the plain old twitter search API.

And the project was for the Bitly API Contest, so I figured I'd just look at bitly links and leave it at that.

That's a great idea -- I'll try implementing it. Thanks.

I would like this for just my "network", maybe people I follow and people they follow.

Sorry for being off topic, but where can you get the news.arc code?

This should send you on your way - http://arclanguage.org/

Looks familiar!

Just got picked up by tech crunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/bitly-news/

Nice. It would be even nicer if it could intelligently handle deduplication. At the moment there are 6 World Cup news stories on the front page.

502 Proxy Error

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

--

Dead already? edit: it's up again!

Dead again.

Edit: Up again.

Dead again.

Forgot I had clicked the link, was wondering how the technical level of content plummeted so quickly. I need more coffee.

Very very cool in concept. In practice... the content is borderline unreadable. Though I guess thats a me thing.

Yeah I have to agree, but I still find this app very interesting and worthwhile. It's just a shame the most tweeted stuff is such dire, pointless BS.

This is very cool. I will be bookmarking.

Heh, whoever put this together didn't remove the user account stuff. I just created an account there and was able to comment & submit stories.

Although, I guess that might have been intended functionality.

To me, ability to comment makes sense, ability to submit stories does not (as per the about page)

Funny, I made this only yesterday: http://pepijndevos.nl/the-age-of-apis-and-virtual-ghost-town...

Love it. I finally have a one-stop resource for breaking news for popular culture and other things outside of the web/tech/digital news that I spend the vast majority of my time reading.

Reddit is awesome for that, BTW, especially as it's sorta categorized and you can add/remove subreddits depending on your interests.

Not sure why, but I feel reticent to comment on an aggregated link. I think this might be an issue. Not sure why, but I want to know that someone had a stake in the submission.

This thing has real potential. Props to whoever put it together.

Why is there a login button and register form if all stories/links are picked from bit.ly automatically. I mean, there is not much registered/logged in users can do.

they can add comments.

The first three commenters are doing their best youtube comment impersonation. I do wonder how you start a new site and keep this kind of thing away.

See also http://pulsememe.com (top 10 story list generated from Pulse news app usage)

I'm surprised so many of the links are in English.

Great site, fun summary of popular links.

heh if this takes off, I can imagine almost every aggregator site having a HN clone of some sort.

I love the "welcome" feature.

categories are needed as you don't have a unified community submitting content

Simple. Effective.