Tweetburner - Track your Twitter Links
By DavidReece • Mar 26th, 2008 • Category: Startups
Do you ever wonder what happens to the links you share on Twitter? Well if you want to know just how your latest ‘lolcats’ tweet was received, Tweetburner could be a good way to find out if you’re an influential twitter-god, or just another face in the crowd.
It’s a great idea for power users who want to track the effectiveness of their tweets, and because you don’t need to sign-up, it’s very easy to use, and converting an URL into a trackable ‘twurl’ takes about 3 seconds. Just enter the original link into the Tweetburner homepage, and it spits out a shortened-url that will be tracked for clicks as soon as you post it to twitter.
The front page lists the most popular twurls for easy tracking, but a possible flaw in this system may show up as the service gets more popular, is that there seems to be no way to track your clicks before it becomes popular. This seems to be a major oversight, and one that could render the service almost useless for casual users.
It’s a shame that such a useful idea would be marred by the lack of any tracking for unpopular links, which at the moment doesn’t seem to have been spotted by the founders due to the service being new and fairly quiet. The homepage does show the most popular in the last hour, which currently ranges from 1-13 clicks on average, but what happens when the site gets busy? You can kiss your under-performing links goodbye as they’re drowned out by other users.
Co-founder, Bob Jansen explains the business model…
“We’re looking into integrating Google AdSense and possible other ads, at a few points on our website. Besides the small advertisements we want to make it possible for companies to display an icon of their company logo next the links that redirect to their domain. This will not enable companies to buy their way into our statistics, but will only make them more visible.”
On first impressions alone, the idea is a solid one, but I hope they add more tracking features, or at least make it more obvious how to find them (it could be that they’re just well hidden). Definitely one to watch, but could lack scalability in the long-run.
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Hello David,
First of all, thank you for writing this post about our service Tweetburner. I am the lead developer and these insights really help us improve the features and functional side of Tweetburner. We’ve started developing Tweetburner only five days ago so we are trying to get as much useful features in as possible.
About your comment on supporting less popular links which might be “forgotton” in respect to the more popular links: you are totally right in your criticism. We are working really hard on this right now. We are going to release a personalized statistics page for every user, so you can track all of the links and Twurls you post, regardless of popularity or clicks. We will post some mockups on the blog in the next few hours.
We will be launching this feature this weekend, so please keep an eye out for our homepage, our Twitter account @tweetburner and the blog at http://tweetburner.com/blog.
Many thanks and we hope to hear more of you!
Michiel and Bob, founders of Tweetburner
Thanks for the update Michiel, looking forward to the new features, as this could be a really useful site. I had no idea the site was only 5 days old(!), I’ll make sure to write a follow-up review after the next update.