Introducing bitly.tv. Say goodbye to productivity. Again

The bitly.tv homepageTechCrunch has the details:

With more than two billion links a month passed through its link shortening service, bit.ly can see what is some of the most buzzed about and shared content on the Web. Today, it is exposing the most popular videos people share through bit.ly on Bitly.TV, which is the second project under bit.ly Labs (the super-short j.mp URL shortener was the first).

With bit.ly being the main way people share links on Twitter, Bitly.TV might as well be called Twitter TV. The videos featured are based on bit.ly’s bitrank algorithm. “The algorithm looks at velocity, popularity and persistence,” says general manager Andrew Cohen. “We’re examining the social distribution history of each video to determine what is trending, and to predict what will go viral.”

I especially love the concept of mathematically measuring velocity, popularity and persistence. It treats the data flowing through the web (well, the bitlyfied web) like a flowing liquid. In fact, I wonder if the principal of fluid dynamics (plus network theory) could be applied to build some super geeky model. Wow, that might have been the nerdiest sentence I've ever typed!

But let's face it. What bitly.tv really is:

• the end of productivity again
• a great mirror held up to the soul of society reflecting our values right back at us.

Apparently our souls are filled with Lady Gaga videos.