A week and a bit ago I attended an Online chat about Twitter and micro-blogging with Bob Walsh. I was actually @ home with my two young children and had joined in late (there were transcripts provided after – very useful. Thanks, Neil).

While I was trying to catch up with what had been said and make sense of the conversation, I realized that no matter what the announced theme was, people taking part could find something interesting to say, share, comment, digress to other topics and overall enjoy the experience. 25 folks joining in an online conversation on a work-related issue and having a good time – this would be my summary of the whole thing.

Most of you are already accustomed with URL address shortening services. You know, those websites which make your URLs short and ugly so you can post them on Twitter, Facebook or just send them to a friend. The thing is you never know where these links end up and how much traffic they drive. For me, working in web analytics, not knowing something like this is itching like hell, so I have decided to find a solution to it.

Tackling the problem

What I did is create a special GreaseMonkey script for Firefox (you need to have GreaseMonkey installed), which offers the possibility of adding Google Analytics variables in order to easily track all the users clicking on the short URL you are just about to generate. Here is how the the new http://is.gd homepage will look like after you install the script.

Right around this time of year, you’re going to start seeing Predictions for 2009. Let me post mine: 2009 is the year you as the CEO of your microISV, startup or ISV get on Twitter.

For those of you who’ve managed to avoid Twitter, or dismissed it as some pointless flakey time waster, here’s a few current facts you should consider:

• Twitter usage is skyrocketing. In October alone, Twitter experienced a 25% climb in traffic, according to comScore, bringing the number of active Twitterers in the U.S. alone to 1.45; worldwide in September it was 5.6 million.
• Twitter has just about retired the “fail whale”. While in the first quarter of 2008 Twitter had more than a few crashes, those issues have been resolved, as this chart from the Royal Pingdom Blog shows:

• Companies – both micro and not – are being wildly successful using Twitter as a way of providing online customer service (read marketing). More about two examples of that next.