Twitter collecting link stats now - watch out, bit.ly
Looks like Twitter is collecting basic stats on links shared through the service (at least for me, at least through the web interface). I was quickly able to capture the interim link before it redirected:
http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fux1VG&linkType=web&tweetId=3541714194&userId=14373036 It's grabbing four things:link_click_count - ostensibly the number of times this link has been clicked; I wonder if this is supported/mandated in the API
linkType - web, in this case [EDIT: another type is username, based on this link: http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fjozyaltidore17&linkType=username&tweetId=3542100645&userId=14373036 ]
tweetId - http://twitter.com/ibogost/status/3541714194
userId - who did the clicking, in this case, me: http://twitter.com/sachinag (I checked the userId by clicking another link)
Note: links only do this the first time I click on them; the second time I click, it goes straight to the link. Also, there's a very obvious period of time while it calls Twitter's servers to log this data.
At the end of the day (yeah, I used to work at a VC firm, shoot me), if I'm bit.ly - or more accurately, Betaworks - I start begging Ev and Biz to buy bit.ly rather than having Twitter roll its own shortener. Hey, Betaworks is an investor in Twitter too (as a result of the Summize acquisition), so maybe they'll bail us out at the expense of the other Twitter investors.
