
Why Twitter's t.co is a game changer - sant0sk1
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/09/why-twitters-recent-announceme.html
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tlrobinson
_"Twitter could turn #coffee into #starbucks."_

Yeah, I'd like to see them try that.

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notahacker
They could have done that a long time ago. If they'd wanted to lose their user
base overnight. Same goes for any tomfoolery with shorturls. Other than
wrecking bit.ly's market share, I don't see t.co changing much.

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tlrobinson
If it wasn't obvious, I was being sarcastic.

Actually I sort of would like to see them try, just for the entertainment of
watching a fiasco 10x worse than Facebook Beacon unfold.

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binarysoul
I'm not sure how this is fundamentally different than twitter integrating with
something like bit.ly

Alistair expects us to believe that bit.ly was sharing no tracking / analytics
information with twitter?

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netaddict
You are right. bitly did tracking and analytics. But Twitter can have even
more information by forcing all users to use t.co.

The point of the article is that Twitter can force every one to use t.co on
its platform and thus provide better analytics, malware detection etc than its
competitors.

It is a game changer for Twitter monetization; not so much for users or
content creators.

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RyanMcGreal
>Twitter can have even more information by forcing all users to use t.co.

I suspect they'd end up with a lot less information if they tried this.

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gojomo
It seems they're planning a soft-force: all URLs will be converted to t.co in
outbound tweets, but the original shortener will still be visible in some
presentations, and t.co will still redirect through the original shortener --
so sites providing some unique value to users still work.

I can't see a major user revolt over that approach -- even though in the long
run it gives t.co such an advantage that other services may whither away.

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decadentcactus
So I may just be still waking up from sleeping pills, but most of this article
seems like a lot of potential things without much actual
direction/decisiveness.

Yes, Twitter CAN do a lot of this, CAN track 500 things and sell them to
"businesses" (who? why?)

> This is the real value of the company -- not just knowing what people are
> talking about, but knowing which things prompt an action, wherever that
> happens.

And then what? What do you do with that?

It feels like this is the same as saying "We'll get millions of users, THEN
figure out how to make money". Except we're a step forward from that, having a
flimsy plan (Sell the "purpose" of visitors to "businesses" who can "use it"
to "whatever") with still no idea of how to do it.

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Splines
I'm all for a business trying to do... business, but all this talk of
monetizing links, engagement, and the "long funnel" is a little irritating. I
feel like I'm begin treated like cattle.

It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if it's possible to build a de-
shortener service.

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xutopia
Alistair is spot on t.co. It will allow Twitter to better track traffic and
they'll be able to sell this information to third parties.

~~~
points
Who do you sell it to?

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maukdaddy
Businesses with deep enough pockets.

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RexRollman
Personaly, I refuse to click on any shortened URIs, especially when using a
Windows box. I just don't care for them.

