By the end of the year, Twitter expects to be recording and analysing every link users click on when using its web site or any of the thousands of third-party microblogging apps associated with it.
In an e-mail announcement on Wednesday, the social-networking company said all users will soon be switched over to Twitter's t.co link-shortening service and, once that happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will use it. In addition, the company said, when anyone clicks "on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click."
In addition, Twitter's e-mail said that developers now have to use the more secure OAuth authentication framework to gain access to a user's account.
Knowing what links are popular can help a sufficiently sophisticated web site to refine its recommendations, and the move likely will let Twitter improve its 'promoted tweets' program and its resonance algorithm, which uses metrics like number-of-clicks to decide which messages are relevant and useful. It can also, as Twitter's Sean Garrett pointed out in June, permit better detection and prevention of malicious links.
For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Twitter plans to record all links clicked on CNET News.
