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I also think this would be really cool, although I would make retweets the source of 'comment' upvotes.

Yes I was hoping for this. In fact, why limit yourself to Bit.ly links? You could literally index every link coming through Twitter. Future expansion: move from Twitter to all public links shared on the entire internet.

At first I tried indexing all links (not just bitly ones) but the volume of results was too much to keep up with. I'm just using the plain old twitter search API.

And the project was for the Bitly API Contest, so I figured I'd just look at bitly links and leave it at that.

That's a great idea -- I'll try implementing it. Thanks.