TwitHot was launched yesterday, developed by Dan Williams and based off of an idea from Steve Poland. The basic premise behind TwitHot is to take the URLs that appear consistently within Twitter user’s messages and display them in a digg-like format.

TwitHot in and of itself isn’t that interesting - it’s basically a counter for the times a URL appears. It doesn’t include any algorithms to determine current popularity (that I saw, I could be wrong) so something that is virally popular will remain at the top all of the time (even if that popularity was from months ago). Another feature that has already been requested by others is the ability to comment on URLs featured on TwitHot.

What is interesting about TwitHot is the fact that it confirms that Twitter can be an amazing backend for some really cool services. TwitThis was featured on quite a few different blogs and it achieves the same - it offers a useful service based off of the Twitter backend.

As excited as Steve Poland is about this technology, it’s hard not to get involved in the hype myself - even though I hate text messages with a passion. The monetization models are out there, we just need to take advantage of them.

Update: There does seem to be some popularity control within TwitHot - I just reloaded the page and some of the URLs with the most mentions have been bumped down by a less mentioned, but newer, URL. Regardless, URLs alone are pretty pointless - I don’t feel the need to click on any of these or visit the sites because I literally have no idea what they are about.