Bitly, the popular URL shortening and tracking website, has introduced a new and useful website called Realtime. Billed as “an internet attention ranking engine, giving you powerful tools for analyzing what the world is paying attention to right now,” Realtime allows Bitly users to select a topic and keywords then filters through various social media websites, domains, languages, and countries and ranks its results by how actively the link is used.
The advantage of Realtime is that it helps you find what you need without having to sift through dead links or websites that are no longer active. And to make it even easier to use, the links shown on Realtime are presented in order from most used to least used, with the most active, or clicked on, links on bit.ly showing up towards the top of the screen.
For example, if you want to know more about the government shutdown, simply type ‘shutdown’ into the search bar and choose keywords politics, Twitter, and United States. You’ll get a short recap of the shutdown just by reading the headlines. If you want to know more, you can click on any of the stories and get some of the most interesting information by clicking on the first, most widely used, link.
Now it’s easier than ever to get up-to-the-minute information on what’s in the news by logging onto rt.ly from your desktop, laptop or smartphone.