For those of you that don’t know Bit.ly, they are the world’s largest URL shortener. When you have to make every bit count in those 140 characters within a Tweet or you just don’t want a broken link in your email, many people use a URL shortener. It’s especially nice for very long URLs like a product on Amazon (115 characters for the deluxe plush wired Santa hat), or a specific article in the New York Times (112 characters for the article about the launch of bitly.tv). They also have fascinating stats on how many clicks a link gets, when it was clicked on and what countries clicked on it.

Because Bit.ly does this at such a large scale — 2 billion clicks a month — and it’s shared mostly through the real time web, it’s a terrific vehicle for discovering what’s timely or interesting. To quote Bit.ly’s blog:

“We’ve thought about the best way to surface our “top bits” — the most interesting, most quickly-trending links across the whole of the bit.ly service. We decided to start with a bite-sized approach. Our second Labs project showcases the most viral videos shared on bit.ly. We call it bitly.tv.”

And, given it’s social media heritage, Bitly.tv makes it easy to share the videos you like with all your friends.

So sit back, click and enjoy the show. And be the first on your block to know which video is hot.

Full disclosure: VeriSign’s iDefense recently announced an arrangement with Bit.ly to provide them spam fighting tools.