Twitter’s In Your Tweets Trackin’ Your Links

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.