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?

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.

Now, they’ve gotten better with the release of version 3 of their API:

This Pivotal Tracker update allows you to see GitHub or other SCM commits in your stories, your project activity in your team’s Campfire chat room, and introduces the first wave of integrations with other bug/issue tracking applications including JIRA, Lighthouse, and Satisfaction.

This update allows me to add a post-commit hook to my Github account by going to the Profile Page on Pivotal Tracker and creating a new API token, then going to the service hooks page of my Github Repository and adding the following line:

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v3/github_commits?token=PIVOTAL_API_TOKEN

as a post-commit URL.

Now, say I have a story for my recent small Ruby on Rails secret learning project, and that story is #2288984. I can create a commit messages like so:

Ullr:tweetscore john$ git commit -a -m "[#2289377] Add profile/login links back to main navigation"

And that story will be started. I can finish a story by committing with the message:

Ullr:tweetscore john$ git commit -a -m "[Fixes #2289377] Add profile/login links back to main navigation"

The great thing about this, is that if you send “fixes” on a story that’s not started, it will start and finish it.h

I haven’t yet played with Get Satisfaction connectivity yet, and don’t use Campfire or Lighthouse, but this is enough to excite me. It makes a killer workflow.

Now, if only someone would create a Quicksilver plugin for Pivotal Tracker…

Today, while exploring the Twitter API and building out a more complex user model, I found an interesting attribute called “contributors_enabled” that was set to false in my user account. I immediately got excited, because this could only mean one thing: Delegation.

I quickly ran over to the Twitter API Wiki to see if my dreams could be true, and sure enough:

Contributors:

• If there are now contributors for a status, then there will be an empty <contributors/> or “contributors”  :  {}.  This field will only be populated if the user has contributors enabled on his or her account — this is a beta feature that is not yet generally available to all.
• This object contains an array of user IDs for users who have contributed to this status (an example of a status that has been contributed to is this one). In practice, there is usually only one ID in this array. The XML renders as such <contributors><user_id>8285392</user_id></contributors>, and the JSON renders as such “contributors”:[8285392].

One of the problems with having a business or group Twitter account is that everyone has to check it and post to it, or ONE person has to do that (in which case, why have it). There’ve been any number of solutions to this problem, but they are all working around the fundamental lack of delegation.

With email accounts, you can allow other people to send email from your account. This happens if, say, you’re a super important business person with a secretary… or if you’re less important, but need multiple people to send mail from a specific account.

Until now (or, rather, until “soon from now hopefully”) you haven’t been able to do that with Twitter. It looks like they are implementing that functionality, as is shown in the example.

This is good news for folks who have group accounts, like my own RubyGorge, which would be aided by having multiple people allow contributions from that account. Way to go Twitter!