Bit.ly URL Shortener use MetaCarta to Include Geo

You’ve probably heard of tinyurl; it swaps in a short (typically incomprehensible) URL for a really long one. Twitter and other tools use such things to cut down on message sizes. ReadWrite Web introduces another player in that space, Bit.ly. The app does what TinyURL does, and more. It stores the past 15 URLs for reference including a few thumbnails. But more interesting, it code the stored pages in a few ways: first it uses Reuter’s Open Calais API (I wrote about it here) to tag it in a content bucket, and then it uses the MetaCarta API to extract locations in the document, thus building a huge index of pages real people determined were of value to need shorter URLs. In time that big database will be open to developers.

via Twitter/Friendfeed