On Twitter there is one flaw that I continuously see. Shortened URLs. Most messages have these URLs and they take up at least 20 characters. That is a lot of “character real estate” (is that a term?).
I propose Twitter catches every URL and changes it into a ♥ symbol. Because URL handling is done centrally I can just continue to copy/paste my ridiculously long URLs into my tweets and I only loose one symbol. At the same time Twitter moves into a position to start making money.
Clicking on a ♥ redirects the user and it gives Twitter the chance to either insert a splash page or incorporate a banner type solution. As Twitter knows the text of the originating tweet; They see if the same link has been tweeted more often and they can analyze the targeted page, I think Twitter has access to plenty of data for seriously targeted ads.
If Twitter wants to be really cool they can decide to share their ad revenues with their users and if they want to be lame they could charge for an ad free version. For the advertisers it would be a simple bidding system based on the words in the tweet and some generic info on the resulting page.
What do you think? Would you hate it?
Update: I found two companies that provide this service: adjix.com and linkingbee.com
The response to their service is highly mixed. Personally I don’t see a problem but obviously there are a bunch of people who take offense if someone makes even less then a tenth of a cent on a click…
