How to Get the Most Value out of Twitter Links

June 18, 2009

I’m not Fred Wilson (who posts ideas and sees them built almost instantaneously) but I’m going to post about something I’d like to see as a Twitter application and maybe, just maybe … someone will build it.

Fred (and many others) are certainly right — the value of Twitter is in the links. We’re seeing real-time search engines like OneRiot put an emphasis on links, and sites like TweetMeme and MicroPlaza that help organize links by popularity. Twitter itself, through Twitter Search is supposedly working on indexing the content of tweeted links to improve its search results with more context. Ultimately none of these systems do exactly what I want.

So here’s what I’d like to see (and it could be a Twitter app, website, integrated into a desktop app, etc.):

  1. Ability to display a list of tweeted links based on interests. For example, I might want to see links for venture capital, startups, montreal and recruiting. So I want the links categorized by self-defined interests. The system would have to index the content of the tweeted links, otherwise I don’t think it would be smart/accurate enough to give me the best content just off keywords or hashtags in tweets.
  2. A URL shortener with tagging. Before indexing the content of links, I think we need a URL shortener that allows us to tag content, like del.icio.us. Hashtags are helpful (and could be used as part of the assessment of links) but there’s not enough space for real tagging in 140 characters. But imagine if you had a URL shortener where you could input a bunch of tags into a separate field. The tags wouldn’t be displayed in the tweet but they would be associated with the URL as a way of identifying the URL and its content. That would help my proposed system a great deal. I’d love to see tagging of tweets built into a URL shortener like bit.ly and then integrated into desktop apps like Tweetdeck. People are fairly comfortable tagging content, and this would add richness tweets and tweeted links.
  3. Ability to rank list of tweeted links by who submitted them. I don’t want to see every link within these categories, it’s too much. So I want to see the links ranked (or filtered) by people I follow, and then allow me to open up the firehose to everyone (which encourages friend discovery.) And ideally it would rank the people I follow as well – by some kind of reputation system (a measurement of the relationship b/w me and that person, how often their links are re-tweeted, etc.) This should bubble up to the top the best links from the best people in the right categories.
  4. Ability to rank list of tweeted links by other factors. Some kind of algorithm is needed to determine the ranking of tweets. Showing only links from people I follow is step one, and implementing reputation on those people is step two. But ultimately displaying popularity of links (based on retweets) and adding other variables could be useful too. But this isn’t the core priority, and this is where most other systems in my mind fail; they focus almost exclusively on popularity of links. That doesn’t help me find the needle in the haystack that really matters to me.
  5. The system has to learn. It would be great if the system learned what I liked over time, to improve the algorithm for displaying a sorted list of the best tweeted links by category/interest. This could include a favorites feature. It might also track how often I click the various links to recognize what content I’m most interested in, and from which person (which in turn could increase that person’s reputation.)
  6. Only show me the links. I don’t want to see the content of tweets – I just want the links (and the submitters’ names.) I find systems that display the tweets are too noisy and messy. The tweet content doesn’t really matter; if the system is smart enough to tell me this is a valuable link from a valuable source, I don’t need to see the message the submitter tweeted the link with. Just give me nice, clean links.

The goal is to capture all the tweeted links of value from the Twitter stream (both from people I follow and those I don’t.) And the secondary goal is to help me discover new people worth interacting with based on the links they’re submitting.

In the spirit of giving, I wanted to throw this idea out there and see what people thought. And maybe, someone will build it, or some element of it. I think in its initial form you would need a URL shortener with tagging + a site for displaying the links in some ranked fashion. The limitation in this system is that the only content that might get picked up initially is content from tagged tweets, which would require people to adopt a new URL shortener. There may be smart ways to overcome that though.

I’ve also got a domain we can use — http://linktwits.com. This was inspired (of course) from Stocktwits, which I think is a brilliant system. I’d be happy to use this domain name for the project.

And, I’m happy to help in any way that I can. I’d certainly be a user of the system, and maybe I can help with other elements of it…

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Comments
  • what a great spec that is!

    i sure hope it gets built
  • Fred - Thanks for the feedback!

    Feel free to post it on your blog, I'm certain it will get a lot more response (both positive and negative.) I'd love to see the idea taken over and come to fruition with other people's help.
  • Terrific! I like number 3, was thinking about this today. I don't mind RTs, but it's more efficient to only have one in my stream (the rest filtered out). I would think the same went for any dupe content. No point in viewing same tweet multiple times.
  • I love Twitter, and I think that it can be a great marketing tool if used correctly. Thank you for this brilliant list of tools to make the Twitter experience even better!
  • Personally I think this twitter thing has gotten way out of hand. Every marketer on the planet is trying to take advantage of this niche, and while I think your idea has a lot of value, I see twitter hitting a saturation point very soon and from there it will start a long decline. Things on the internet get very hot, very quick to the point where the next big thing (twitter) is all you see and hear about. When everyone knows about it, and everyone is trying to get into it, that's usually when you can bet that the decline is coming soon.
  • I think you are onto something here, I would definitely use a product that includes what you mentioned above. Wish I could help on the dev side.
  • These are some good ideas. Which may help alot.
  • Linktwits...that is an awesome domain name. I will be watching to see what gets built on that domain.
  • This is a fantastic idea and as you say I am sure someone will build an application built to fulfill this aim. Twitter is a great tool and can be leveraged better.
  • Some good info stuff here..#3 is great..
    I know I need to be doing more with my twitter page...
    Cheers
  • I question the only show me the links. I like a part of Twitter that gives me a couple words so I know if the link is interesting to me or not. With the parameters you can't keyword stuff the text before the link.
  • Thanks for the feedback. But the idea behind LinkTwits.com is that the system knows what you're interested in and ranks accordingly. It would read the content of pages that are linked to via Twitter to learn what those pages are about, because oftentimes what people put in a tweet with a link isn't useful information and clutters the interface.
  • jim
    I like the idea of tagging the link itself and having it capture tag metadata, rather than using hashtags, that alone would be a good improvement over the current shortening.
  • These days Tweeter has become a more indispensable tool for marketing. We need to use it effectively and judiciously to make hay of it. The ideas you have given are all in that direction.
  • Unless Twitter gets it's act together and gets servers that can keep up with the demands placed on them, I can't see them remaining popular through the year.
  • Of late Twitter's been quite good at staying online and performing reasonably well. I wouldn't say those issues are completely behind them, but the worst would appear to be behind them. We'll see!
  • Great post!

    I definately think Twitter can be moblized as a great marketing tool - though I think for it to be effective marketeers need to be selective in what they choose to 'tweet'
  • What a great post!

    I definately think that Twitter is a powerful marketing tool, but I think maketeers should bear in mind that Social Media is about conversation, not just blatant promotion.

    Thank
  • Another url shortener I´d like to recommend is http://0845.com/
  • i'm a bit over it. i can't sit there and look at it all day and how do i know of all this noise is worth noticing ?
  • Sam - I think it's a question of who you follow, how you interact with those people and what you're looking for.

    I've found Twitter to be extremely useful for a few things:

    * staying connected with friends, colleagues, etc.
    * research (this is growing more and more important, at least for me)
    * promotion / marketing

    There is a lot of noise, but the tools are emerging (like TweetDeck, etc.) to filter that noise effectively. CoTweet helps businesses filter the noise for example.
  • Twitter has become a tool that no business can ignore for promoting their business. Very well written.. Keep up the good work!
  • What's about business model for this service (linktwits.com)? AdSense?
  • Pavel - That's a good question. Advertising has the potential of making money, although long-term I don't think I would rely exclusively on that as a business model.

    One of the values out of a service like this is in the data. If you get to scale, you're accumulating a lot of data on what people are linking to, and how they're tagging it. That data has the potential of being valuable to a number of people.

    You can also sell advanced features such as better/more detailed analytics to users.

    The initial focus would have to be on gaining traction and not revenue, because you'd be competing with other link shortening services that have a huge head start, namely bit.ly. So the focus would have to be on differentiating yourself from services like bit.ly and adding value to the ecosystem.
  • Ben, thanks for the answer.

    I really like the idea and even thinking of doing it.

    Why do we need one more shortening service? IMHO it's a long way trying to gather tags for short urls. There are 200+ shortening services (http://longurl.org/services). Also there are 20+ bookmarking services like del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_boo...) which give us an ability to tag urls.

    So, my suggest using all the power of the available services and just join the data in the linktwits service to get a unique feature as you've described in your post.

    I'm going to do a shot in the dark with this one - to check number of plain urls that are shortened in bookmarking services. If the number is quite big (for instance, if more than 50% percent of shortened urls already have tags through bookmarking services), my advice would be to look at it more closely.

    WDYT?
  • Pavel - I'm not sure the percentage of shortened URLs that have tags through bookmarking services is that high. I would guest that most people are tweeting links w/o also putting them into bookmarking services and tagging them.

    Ultimately I do agree that the tagging component would be best leveraged through an existing URL shortener; bit.ly would be great since it already has the market largely cornered w/ its Twitter relationship. Millions of links are going through bit.ly (on a daily basis, I believe.)

    But initially, it would be a proof of concept play to see if the system would work, and then you could look at integrating with a service like bit.ly. I'm certainly open to ideas!
  • Thanks for your article! Really helpful.. Dell has made some profit from Twitter customers .. this shows that modern businesses may need Twitter to increase the reach to 'right' customers in future.
  • johnjohn12343
    I really dont get twitter. I think I must be about the only person in the world left thinking this but whats the point?

    I see its marketing benefits but for the life of me cant see why the average person with nothing to promote would want to bother??
  • inkapoint
    Happy to see that you got such a domain. And well said dude.
  • Joe
    This idea's genius. I really hope someone does build this
  • Great idea and spec - I'd love to see something like this available..
  • vic
    That's a detailed request and thank you for spelling it out. It's a menu or road mapfor those developers to follow.
  • neeshu
    I recently read in the news paper that a boy did a research saying twitter is uninteresting site hi we are a 35 year old travel company, we provide cheap flights to Manila, Perth and several other locations, will you be willing to exchange links with us mail me neeshu on crystaltravel.co.uk or visit www.flybliss.co.uk
  • ravm
    As I'm somewhat new to Twitter, this is great information. Thanks for sharing. Look forward to reading more from you.
  • I'm waiting for an app that combines what PostRank does but for Tweets or feeds like FriendFeed. There's just too many platforms to be on and we need something that combines them all under one service.
  • Great Ideas! I believe twitter can be a great marketing tool if used in the right way.
  • Flaw
    I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first one who says that but I really don't get twitter and all the attention that it gets. Not only that I don't use it, I don't even have a clear idea of what it does.
    A friend of mine kept bugging me with it and I understood that it can only type short messages so he has to use an url shortening tool, like tinyurl. From what I understood from your post, a tool like that should really be implemented by default in the twitter post, shortening the urls by itself and maybe a self-extraction process of the keyword from the url, to use it as a tag or an anchor?
    I don't know... Twitter is a real mistery
  • A ranking system which categorizes tweets is an awesome idea, and any algorithm that can implement this will be deeply appreciated by everyone in the blogging community.
  • yuva
    I normally use Twitter for my marketing and personal uses, but i learned here to harness Twitter for our benefit in a more sagacious way.
  • edharris
    Thanks for the tips. Frankly, I don't use twitter that often because I assume nobody wants to hear "updates" about insurance products. But, I suppose I should provide more informative content rather that "sales-type" of content and it will be good for everybody.
  • hospedagem
    I really dont get twitter. I think I must be about the only person in the world left thinking this but whats the point?
  • These are awesome ideas! I wish Twitter would incorporate some of these, I would especially like to see the system learning about our interests over time and displaying tweets based on those interests.
  • jasonfreemon
    I'll definitely agree with this. Twitter is one of the better things that has happen to my blog, it's enabled me to let multitudes of people to know that I've updated my blog instantaneously!
  • The twitter ideas are great. I think some outsourcing could really get this done in a matter of days for you!
  • "Sponsored Tweets"...I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this company.
  • Sponsored Tweets - like sponsored blog posts - is an interesting area for people to go. I really don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. I'm definitely not someone that's completely AGAINST sponsored content. Like a lot of things it's there, can be abused, and will be abused by some. But for others it will bring value. I think the people who are so adamantly against it should relax and worry about something else.
  • Giu
    I'm reading that Twitter does not reach the young people, only people with more than 25 years. Isn't it a problem for the future?
  • dragonblogger
    Leveraging sites like Hootsuite which can track link clickback and provide analytics for your links are very useful, that plus twitter analyzer shows you trends in your tweet patterns, these tools combined make it very easy to maximize and optimize your twitter patterns.
  • I feel it is crucial to establish links for seo and linkbait is not as well as it used to be I feel. As you explained because of twitter and more... Thank you for the information.
  • 7.? The app forces you to engage people. You shouldn't just retweet verbatim (or be able to) - ask questions and challenge! 'Conversations' (and the spread of your tweets) can multiply exponentially when fed on the challenge of thought, bringing you traffic.
  • I integrated twitter to my blog.I hope it will be more good for my blog.Good articles.Thanks.
  • webdevelopment
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    thanks sharing.
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  • designclub7
    Very informative Article. Really I get useful information about Twitters links in this article.

    Thanks
    Design Club7
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