links for 2009-03-31

  • The 6 stages of Twitter media coverage hell – Computerworld Blogs (via @steverubel)
    "…And now, the inevitable "Twitter backlash" has begun. What does it all mean?

    In a word, nothing.

    The so-called backlash is just the media's knee-jerk pseudo-contrarianism, right on schedule. Obviously Twitter has been clearly overexposed and overhyped in the media, and now reporters and commentators are both slamming their own hype, and, inevitably, attacking Twitter itself.

    My advice: Don't take any of it too seriously."

    (tags: twitter media)

Measuring the Scoble Effect Using bit.ly

Earlier tonight, I tweeted about the Ellen Show reaching 500 thousand followers on Twitter in just three weeks.

A few minutes later, Robert Scoble liked the tweet on FriendFeed. Robert routes his FriendFeed over to Twitter, so it quickly showed up on Robert’s Twitter feed…


When I tweet a link, it usually only gets about 20-25 clicks but, in this case, the clicks went through the roof according to Bit.ly. As soon as Robert liked that tweet, the link that I posted got over 900 clicks in about 6 minutes.

A few thoughts on this:

  • A simple Like or Retweet from an A-Lister like Robert can drive significant traffic. This is hard proof that, with the right exposure, traffic from Twitter can achieve something similar to the Digg Effect.
  • The Twitter Effect can be very short lived. In this case, my tweet didn’t get many other retweets, so the number of clicks quickly went down after about 10 minutes.
  • Bit.ly provides great analytics for measuring stuff like this. Is it useful enough to justify the recent $2 million round of funding? I guess we’ll see.