140Char

It’s great to see a mainstream media report into something mroe insightful than the latest celebrity uproar on Twitter, so the fact that the Wall Street Journal looked at the 301works.org initiative to preserve and archive short urls is a refreshing change.

Not only that but it also raises some interesting points, including the legal aspect of short urls disapearing – a point which also hadn’t occured to 301works.org director and web legend Stowe Boyd, so I don’t feel too bad for not spotting it sooner!

And considering the increasing number of lawsuits regarding content on Twitter which is defamatory or libellous, this could be an increasingly important aspect of the work 301works.org is doing, in addition to maintaining the usefulness of short urls.

It’s always interesting following the various rumours concering who might be buying Twitter etc, but it’s a lot more fun when Twitter itself starts making a lot of changes – particularly when co-founder Biz Stone is publicly dismissing the rumours and saying Twitter isn’t for sale.

• Twitter search is going to get a lot more interesting (Cnet)

Twitter search will soon crawl links included in Tweets and that content, along with a reputation ranking system – as confirmed by Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, who was formerly VP of Search Quality for Google.

• Enhanced new follower emails (LousGray)

New follower emails include the new follower’s name, Twitter username, and picture. They also include the number of updates, number of people they follow, and number of followers they have, plus the ability to block them from within the email.

• Twitter replaces TinyURL with Bit.ly as url shortener (RWW)

Until now, Twitter automatically shortened links with TinyURL, but the switch to Bit.ly (Which I use anyway), means a lot more analytics, as well as an increase in reliability (given as the primary reason for the switch).

Considering Twitter’s self-monetisation (rather than selling) was scheduled for early this year, it’s not hard to see the increase in data capabilities from Search and Bit.ly, which could easily tie-in to an upsell for businesses etc using the service.

Meanwhile the issue of mainstream adoption and scaling of email alerts is something which is affecting businesses and individuals, and is something 3rd party services were already capitalising on.

What happens next?

Aside from the integration of all of the data tools into one package for a premium, it’s interesting to note that Twitter hasn’t dabbled in the client space yet – is this somewhere where they’re far happier with 3rd parties competing with each other?

Theoretically it could be building itself up pre-sale, but given the potential of the service with the additional data it will now provide, this seems less likely.

What the new search functionality will mean is that linking from Twitter will suddently become a lot more important than the current traffic driving (as the links are designed no-follow at the moment), and for websites and blogs, perhaps the additional data will lead to various ranking systems placing a big value on Twitter presence.