Twitter URL Wrapping will give it tons of user data
Posted on September 2, 2010
Filed Under HR SEO, twitter | Leave a Comment
Twitter.com just announced that over the coming weeks they will start deploying a url shortening tool, similar to sites and tools like Bit.ly and budurl, etc.
When released, all urls posted through twitter, including from all apps.
This probably isn’t much of a concern to most people, however, I’m concerned for a couple of reasons.
First, Twitter can barely keep their servers up at their current growth pace now. How are they going to manage redirecting millions of links every second, each and everyday?
I expect they will have to roll it out really slowly.
Second, this really isn’t a concern, to me, but it should be to a lot of people. Twitter will finally know exactly what users are doing with their service. They will know what sites they are sending clicks to, who the user is who created the click, and who the user is who clicked on the link. This will create a massive amount of user data that sites like google and facebook don’t have.
From a business perspective, I think Twitter just figured it out.
If they can use that kind of data to “prioritize” tweets, to sell ad space, or to customize twitter search results based on the number of clicks (kind of like relevance based on user conversions / click), they have a real business model.
I can’t wait to see where it all leads.
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