A blog about location aware services, cloud architecture, mobile applications development on the iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, whatever, plus traveling, microblogging, and other random musings from developers building some secretly cool stuff

As Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream, the conversation about it’s value (or perceived lack there of) seems to be getting louder and louder. Today there was even talk about a Google acquisition. This chatter has made both my non-techie friends and friends in the technorati circle, alike poo poo all things Twitter. For the techie many wonder if it’s over valued, and over played on media outlets like Tech-Crunch and friends, and for the non-techie many just “don’t get it” (at least until they dive in). In fact super twitterer Robert Scoble got so annoyed last night at people undervaluing twitter that he pontified that Twitter is one of the best brands in decades and that the BW article pointing at 250 million is complete undervaluation and it should be more like 1 Billion.

Why?

Because, to steal a line from my good friend @gammill, “Twitter has become an entirely new social behavior”. No it’s not as revolutionary as the Internet, but nor is it just one more “social networking” thing either. If anything its beginning to bring out the type of shift that is akin to the early days of email. Yes that’s right, it’s become an entirely new way to communicate easily with people. Like it or not, the fact is micro blogging is going to the new and maybe even preferred way of communication for a society that’s becoming busier and busier.

Now stop and think about what that means. When email first was invented it was done largely through the caretakings of the University system, which wasn’t trying to financially capatilize on it. That didn’t come until later (and think about how companies like Hotmail still had a giant exit decades after the invention). Now we have a case where a company actually owns the brand and all of the earlier adopters (counted in the millions) around the next shift in communication. You think that’s worth something - you bet it is.

In fact, (epecially lately) there have been a plethora of new companies popping up to work with the twitter api because of it’s value. Here’s just a few:

• Exectweet - connecting top business folks on twitter
• Cotweet - helps companies reach customers through twitter
• Magpie - an ad network for twitter
• Mashable - a tech blog that  sells ad space to show off company tweets
• Tinker: tracks trends to plug into a monitization model for brands.
• As well as a whole slew of iPhone and Android twitter “premium apps” that mobile users are buying in droves

No doubt, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other companies that are already making money off Twitter too(feel free to let me know who I missed in the comments).  Scoble even twittered about companies that were already doing millions in revenue from twitter affiliation.  So now stomp and consider what it means if there is already that lucrative of an ecosystem around a company, that’s not making any money on it’s own yet, is partnering with these monotizing third parties through a rather simple API set, and only has 30 or so employees.  What we are talking about here is basically the poster child for how to grow an ecosystem completely organically.  And Twitter is sitting their patiently, holding the keys to it all.

So you may wonder when you see all of those TinyUrl version of links to your site on Twitter if those links actually positively affect your sites page ranking.  If so read on…

The quick answer is mostly no… and the long answer is of course more technically complicated.  First lets delve into TinyUrl.  In case you dont know what TinyUrl is basically it can take any URL and turn it into a shortened “tinyurl” - perfect for microblogging sites like Twitter where you only have 140 ish characters to get what you have to say across and you dont want long urls waisting those preshish 140 characters.

Now the TinyUrls service at the technical end generally does things right.  For example a link to socialguides gets converted to http://tinyurl.com/clpr7g.  And what is happening behind the scene is that when you click on that link it takes your browser instantaneously (so you never know) to the TinyUrl server and they lookup what that URL actually responds to and the forward you off to the real URL before you ever knew your browser went anywhere.

What’s important (from an SEO perspective) about the redirect from TinyUrl is that they do it via a 301 header redirect which tells your browser (in a standard compliant way) that the actually URL has “permanently moved” to the real address.  This is incredibly key as Google passes the pagerank for the original tinyurl not over to tinyurl.com but to socialguides.com, or well whatever the final site is supposed to be. That’s a good thing.

Unfortunately its not all rosey in the land of TinyUrl and Twitter services.  First, because of the nature of tinyurl shortening the link you no longer have anchor tags.  For example if you make a link like this: Techzulu a cool technology blog covering southern california , Google will assoicate the link reference to the Techzulu site with potentially important keywords like “technology blog” and “southern california”.  Now if we look at the TinyUrl version: http://tinyurl.com/ack7de we see that there are no anchor tags and thus less SEO loven.

Now if that wasnt bad enough, when it comes to Twitter the thing I said about the 3o1 redirect that TinyUrl does that allows you to get the “link juice” actually doesn’t even count.  The reason is Twitter takes all URLs found in posts and appends a “nofollow” to each link.  This means that Google will not follow the link at all and thus gives you no credit for said link. This, much like wikipedias implementation, is primarily to avoid spam from blackhat seo folks and the like.

On onehand this really isnt a TinyUrl problem at all so why do I bring it up?  Only because if your link is fully written out on Twitter (in long form) at least you get a little bit of that silly marketers thing called “brand awareness” for your site even if you dont get Google credit for it.  If TinyUrl is used, not only do you not get Google credit for it, you also dont get any brand loven either.

Unfortunately while I understand the Google spam issue, and the reason for nofollow on Twitter it is unfortunate that Google has asked Twitter to implement it that way.  If people are talking about a website then surely that is precisely what Googles pagerank SHOULD be counting to determine popularity/authority/etc.  But that rant is probably for a different post.

So all that said, should TinyUrl still be used?  Probably, because you likely still need to shorten URLs on microblogs and you get what you get.  As for us, we’ll be partnering with a with a very cool company that is still in stealth mode (and arent we all ) in the future that could help resolve some of these shortcomings. Stay tuned.

Sources: beussery web1marketing andybeard