The @TwitterAPI kids say “size doesn’t matter”

It looks like the folks on the Twitter API team have built their own URL shortener and will soon wrap all URLs to protect against fishing and collect stats:

Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn’t a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we’re taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We’re testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.

The title of this post is what I find most interesting: “Links and Twitter: Length Shouldn’t Matter.” It harkens back to the old saying “it’s not the size of your wand that counts, it’s the magic you can perform with it.”¹

In this case, it is the magic. I ran a URL shortener for a while, mostly as an experiment, and the thing that makes them great is the stats and pre- and post-processing you can perform on the URLs. They could get those links if they wanted to. Twitter already has every link we send to them in their database– their in the status messages after all– but this is subtly different.

Just like with any URL shortener, someone will hit http://t.co/y4d4 and be instantly redirected to the shortened URL. But prior to that redirect, Twitter can filter phishing attempts or scams (effectively nullifying any attempt). More importantly, hits on that URL will be tracked, just like bit.ly tracks stats on URLs so that you know how many people clicked the link to the latest photo of Sarah Palin in a mini-skirt.

And there’s the magic.²

There’s a lot of data going through Twitter, and building a system that effectively injects links and stats directly into a database is sauce.³ It not only allows them to say “That’s a link to a Nigerian phishing scam,” it allows them to say “Hey, New York Times, we have a record of 75 thousand visitors per hour to your article on Sarah Palin’s legs… you wanna talk about a strategic partnership?”

See? Magic.

Who said Twitter didn’t have a monetization strategy?

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1. We’ll leave out the joking about who says that… but it’s not my wife! [↩]
2. no, not Sarah Palin’s legs! (though they are… nevermind) [↩]
3. Spicy sauce, as spicy as Sarah Palin’s– nevermind. [↩]