Twitter - and Reuters - making a play for real-time search  By
John Bowman, CBCNews.ca  Last week, the New York Times Bits blog
wrote about Twitter's switch from TinyURL.com to bit.ly as its
default URL shortener, the service that provides shorter URLs
for web pages so that they'll fit into a 140-character tweet.  I
linked to the post on @CBCtechbytes and got some sarcastic
feedback about this earth-shattering news. After all, what does
it matter which service Twitter uses? There's no difference,
other than five or so characters you save using bit.ly, right?
Well, there's a lot more to bit.ly than just a shorter URL. Add
a plus sign to the end of any bit.ly URL and you can see traffic
data about that page, updated in real time. You can also see a
list of tweets that use that URL, so you can keep track of how a
link is spreading around Twitter.  At the bottom of the bit.ly
info page is a collection of metadata about the link, including
title, summary, and a list of "entities" that appear in the
article. An en