Just before Twitter went down again yesterday, many Twitter users noticed a fleeting click tracker in the address bar of the browser before it redirected them to the final site — which might be the cause of downtime as too many people clicked on the redirects. Redirects that look like that http://twitter.com/link_click_count…
When it came back again, the fleeting click tracker was gone so maybe this was just a preview test of what Twitter intends to do in the future.
Apparently Twitter looks determined to track all the links a user clicks on the site, but this is not something utterly new as they already do it in an unorganized way. Currently a user gets redirected twice, first by the shortened URL and then by Twitter itself. Maybe Twitter wants to know where it is sending the most amount of traffic, who is sending the most traffic and which are the most popular tweets.
The entire data can be useful for Twitter‘s planned analytics service intended for business customers.
[via TechCrunch] Original image by theelusivefish
