Twitter is now tracking data about outbound links on their website. While this has been covered before, it is worth exploring how, why, and what effects it has on us.
If you click an outbound link on Twitter.com and immediately hit stop, your browser’s address bar will display something something similar to:
http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsu.pr%2F1VF3eU&linkType=web&tweetId=3822962256&userId=17594917&authenticity_token=fa92ae1a3b002f6051a9f8d304cef09e0095ee09
If you allow this link to continue loading, you will be redirected to the URL on which you clicked via a 0.1 second meta refresh.
Let’s take a look at what information Twitter is collecting.
- http://twitter.com/link_click_count
- It appears fairly obvious that Twitter’s aim is to count clicks on outbound links.
- url=http%3A%2F%2Fsu.pr%2F1VF3eU
- If you’re not familiar with URL encoding, don’t let the messy-looking characters scare you. This is the equivalent of http://su.pr/1VF3eU
- linkType=web
- Refers to where the link was clicked. At this time, it appears that Twitter is only tracking links on Twitter.com. The existence of this parameter seems to be evidence that they are considering expanding beyond that.
- tweetId=3822962256
- A unique number assigned to every Tweet. Combining this number with the username of its Tweeter will display the status update: http://twitter.com/seanwf/status/3822962256
- userId=17594917
- This number is used to uniquely identify each Twitter user; roughly equivalent to their username.
- authenticity_token=fa92ae1a3b002f6051a9f8d304cef09e0095ee09
- A unique random string value. This security measure was unfortunately exploited by the hacker behind the StalkDaily Worm fiasco.
What Does Twitter Know?
We can glean from this that Twitter now has access to a smorgasbord of information about links on Twitter.com. As it turns out, the “authenticity_token” mentioned above is actually a cookie-based string. What this means to us is that Twitter can track a user’s click-behavior over multiple accounts.
Twitter can correlate your click-behavior with all of the information related to your account including:
- Name
- Location
- Bio
- Homepage
- Following
- Followers
- Date Joined
- Time Zone
- Tweets
The same data is available about the user who shared the link with you and any users mentioned in the tweet. All data related to the Tweet containing the link is also tied to your click such as:
- Date Created
- Users Mentioned
- Application Used
Good for Twitter, Bad for Users
Personally, I have noticed that this redirection adds a noticeable lag when loading external pages. It appears that I am not the only one experiencing this unfortunate side-effect. Another negative consequence to users is that when Twitter experiences server issues, the outbound links on Twitter.com may stop working.
Twitter has yet to announce any plans to make this data available to developers. Could this be part of a larger strategy to make Twitter.com relevant despite less than 10% of the platform’s traffic passing through the website? One thing is certain. This new feature gives Twitter access to an enormous quantity of valuable information that can be used to generate revenue through their new commercial accounts.
Delving Deeper into the Data – Twitter Demographics
In my next post, we will be exploring the demographics of Twitter users through a meta-analysis of about a dozen data sets. What we learn may surprise you and challenge some assumptions about the types of people using the micro-blogging platform.
Notes
Photo curteosy of Flickr and:
Inside Facebook
