Twitter Archive

We were the first to report last month on Twitter tracking your links. The click functionality adds a “click event” to add links clicked on the site. So if you click a link to CN, click a friend’s profile or click a link over to one of the third party apps, Twitter is tracking it.

The links appear normal to the naked eye but when clicked they morph to something like this:

http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url

From my previous post, “It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.”

My guess is that they are tracking the links for both internal and external purposes and perhaps this is the first step to some sort of ranking matrix. Please leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: A CN reader tells me that TweetMeme appears to not be counting correctly and he wonders if this new click tracking has anything to do with it. I don’t use TweetMeme but will contact the service for more details.

It appears that sometime today, Twitter added new functionality that adds a “click event” to add links clicked on the site. So if you click a link to CN, click a friend’s profile or click a link over to one of the third party apps, Twitter is tracking it.

Darren Stuart first found this functionality earlier and noted that Twitter isn’t modifying the actual URLs but instead adding a javascript event which runs the “http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=’urlhere’” function.

It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.

We can guess that the URLs are being tracked for internal stats, for some sort of hot URL board, for metrics to use with advertisers, etc. There’s also been talk about Twitter creating some sort of engine so perhaps this is the first step.

Leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: it appears the tracking links are gone as of now.

In my past life I was responsible for creating archives of content after our consumer products went live. This was pre-Web 2.0 and was typically a painful process trying to make sure that I grabbed every product mention.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.
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Social client software provider Sobees is announcing the launch of their web browser-based client today. The new Sobees web client (which is in Alpha) combines Twitter and (soon) Facebook access. There is also real-time search via OneRiot, Twitter and Friendfeed.

As you can see in the graphic below, you can setup the Sobees web application with as many panels as you would like. The panels can be setup as Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (soon) and real-time searches. For example, I could have one panel for my @centernetworks Twitter account, one for my @cloudcontacts Twitter account, a search for “web blogs that don’t link”, a search for “great web startups”, etc.

Sobees is based in Switzerland and competes with London-based Tweetdeck (which moments ago announced a new round of funding in the amount of 2 million pounds) and valley darling Seesmic. Seesmic has been talking about a browser-based version for a while now but it hasn’t launched as of yet.

The big issue with Sobees in the past was that you needed a windows machine and some runtimes to get the service to work. With this new web-based version, you need only Silverlight which works on both Windows and Mac in any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

The tool also offers an anti-spam function which allows you to enter a variety of terms that will be blocked in your timeline and/or search results.

My only real suggestion for the Sobees team is to consolidate their product names – get rid of bDule and just offer Sobees Web, Sobees Lite and Sobees Full. I think it’s a bit confusing that bDule = sobees Web.

Update: Seesmic Web client is now live as well – read a very in-depth review by Frederic Lardinois at Readwriteweb.

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Content sharing and bookmarking service Shareaholic has announced the launch of the Shareaholic Buzz Monitor today. Through a new formalized partnership with OneRiot, Shareaholic users can now monitor real-time trending topics on OneRiot and Twitter.

Shareaholic is also using their own proprietary data within the real-time results. The topics cover news, videos and blogs. What’s interesting with today’s announcement is that users can also share the interesting trending topics on any of the 60+ services that Shareaholic supports which includes Digg, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, ping.fm, etc.

Mozilla reports over 1 million activations and the service works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari and Songbird.

Earlier this week we broke the news when the official Microsoft PR Twitter account added their third tweet. Unfortunately we missed the chance to break the news that the account was now fully staffed and their first two tweets went out to the world – another reporter got that story.

Since then we’ve seen major public companies post for new employees that have a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter.

But the HUGE news this evening is that Microsoft and Linux have made love on Twitter by exchanging tweets. While there are 10,000 startups that wish they got coverage, instead a twitter message gets mad coverage.

The Microsoft/Linux tweets are nothing compared to our BREAKING NEWS that a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan have exchanged Twitter messages. Typically this is banned – for example, as a Yankee fan, I am banned from the entire state of Massachusetts.

After 100 years of the most heated rivalry in all of sports, there just might be a new day dawning for two of the most storied teams in baseball. Will this conversation continue? Will Yankee fans eat baked beans and will Boston fans finally realize that the Yankees are the better team? I don’t know but I can assure you this…. if it happens on Twitter, we will break it!

Last night while winding down and watching Ask This Old House, I was alerted to an important post by MG Siegler (MG writes for Techcrunch). The post noted that Microsoft Corporation is now tweeting (that means they are posting up to 140 character messages on the Twitter service). This is huge news! Microsoft’s competitors like Google and Sun and Oracle and Zappos are already tweeting so it’s huge news that Redmond is now on their game too.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.