Name: Hilary Mason
Title: Chief scientist, bit.ly
Location: New York City

I joined bit.ly as chief scientist in October of 2009. The company is a URL-shortener and content-sharing platform; we provide tools for people to share and track links on the Internet.

People might not imagine that there are scientists working at Internet start-ups, but bit.ly was a bit ahead of the trend of recognizing the value of data. Approximately one third of my day is spent doing pure research—looking at data about what people click on, trying to figure out what it says about human behavior and communication. I look for interesting events, trends or visualizations. During the World Cup, for example, we could determine what two teams were playing and what team won without even watching the game—during the games the people in the two competing countries would be clicking on soccer links. After the game, though, the people in the winning country would continue to click soccer links while the people in the losing country would not.

The other two thirds of my day I focus on translating models and equations into functional systems. Re­cently we built a program that takes a link you’re interested in and spits back similar links. It’s great for finding different perspectives on the same topic. In our current project we’re developing a social newsreader that learns your interests and recommends links in real time. After that, we’d like to provide contextually aware information. So if you’re a pizza lover in New York City, we’d let you know right away if a famous pizza place nearby is having a special.

After graduate school, I joined Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island as an assistant professor, but I continued to program in addition to teaching and working on research. I built a program that crawled job boards to determine which skills employers value, which helped Johnson & Wales explore ways to improve its curriculum.

Projects like that made me realize that I wanted mainly to code and build useful things, so I left teaching.

I’m really curious about people—what their desires and interests are—and bit.ly’s data tell me that. It gives me an unprecedented window into human communication and behavior.

This article was originally published with the title Getting to Know You.

6 Comments

1. 1. Qigong 10:37 PM 3/22/11

   BEWARE:
   BIT.LY AND SO MANY SOCIAL NET CLUBS DO NOT ALLOW UN-SUBSCRIBING. KNOW WHY? YOUR INFO IS THEIR ASSET, THINK THEY WANT TO LOSE IT?
   
   JUST ANOTHER MILKING OPERATION...WHO BUYS THEIR ASSETS?
   
   FOLLOWING IS FROM THEIR FAQ....GOTTA LOVE IT, USA TODAY.
   
   How do I close my bit.ly account?
   Answer: We don't currently support the closing of bit.ly accounts. But you can easily archive individual URLs from your history or simply stop using our service.

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2. 2. jtdwyer 07:58 AM 4/8/11

   So, is this article an advertisement for companies that might buy the information bit.ly gleans from its users' activities, or is there some other point here?
   
   I bet that that it can be determined who won the soccer match much faster simply by watching the match or any of the many sports reporting sites. It's not all that complicated, and less prone to misinterpretation!

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3. 3. mesmoiron 02:10 AM 4/10/11

   @Qiqong this might be so that our behavioral data is an asset and therefore kept as a company resource. However there are two major shifts in human behavior that can be seen as a growing trend. One is the increase of use and spread of freely available services and software and the closely related trend of ordinary human empowerment.
   
   Most tools and services we take for granted today were born from companies' desire to learn from the huge data the online world has to offer. However since our own lives get more and more digitized we face an incremental pile of raw data. So even though companies as bit.ly feed of our data; there will be a time when citizens will use the same technique for the handling of private data. In this is the seed of growing citizen empowerment. The use of data makes it a good of bad thing. Like every normal human being we have our own brain as data storage. Now that I placed this reaction you can store this information about me. Nothing I can do about it; only deleting it and move on. Nobody would know except for SA databases.

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4. 4. Greg 08:17 PM 4/10/11

   There is a ch missing it that URL.
   
   Anyway, I worked in data analysis for years making money on modeling the obvious, like realizing that a winning teams supporters are going to continue searching soccer links more often than the losers are. Then I got tired of it and retired early to pursue alcohol research.

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5. 5. cubeboy 06:19 PM 4/12/11

   One other interesting point about this: most people don't seem to realize that the ".ly" country suffix stands for guess what: Libya! Yes, no kidding. Those domains are registered to Libya so money paid for a ".ly" URL goes to support the government of Libya, which means Colonel Moammar Gadhafi! Nice ...

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6. 6. akiasugi 12:31 PM 7/12/11

   As I just wrote to an acquaintance:
   
   Every time you contact the web, someone is going to be putting cookies on your account without your knowing it just to track your activity. This is usually meant to increase their marketing demographics, and like the Nielson ratings for television, they sell advertising space with prices based on their ability to contact target demographics.
   
   There are some legitmate corporations whose only function is to develop demographic data sets in this way.
   
   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-to-know-you
   
   The only way they can accomplish this is by installing spyware on people's accounts.
   
   You need to find out how to remove such invaders both from PCs and cell phones.
   
   Obviously something has got through already.
   

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