It seems as though Christmas is getting less popular. Check out the world search volumes since 2004. Yes, volumes were up in 2009 vs. 2008, but there were also much more news volume about the holiday. The increase in search volume was not commensurate with the increase in news volume. I guess people are tuning Christmas out.
I’m an unabashed fan of Bit.ly and the guys at Betworks . For me, Bit.ly makes Twitter useful. Without it, I’m not sure I would use Twitter nearly as much. Like anything though, Bit.ly has some room for improvement. Here are the features I’d most like to see from my favorite web app: 5. Bookmarking for your shortened links – if you post a of lot links, your history fills up pretty fast. Sometimes you shorten links for an email or to display permanently on a website etc. If you want to go back in time and see how many people have clicked, you have to thumb through page after page of your past links. It would be nice to have bookmarks, so you could go back to a key link quickly. 4. Hourly click graphs – su.pr and few others do this. Looking at the performance of your links over the course of a day is interesting in terms of understanding your audience and knowing when to post items for maximum reach and engagement. 3. Deeper geo location data for clicks – It’s great to know what countries I’m getting my traffic from, but the data is more of a tease than anything. For instance, I tend to get a large proportion of my clicks from Russia. Why? I don’t know anyone there. I post mainly US related information. Where the hell are all these Russian clicks coming from? Knowing the specific location doesn’t answer all my questions about this issue, but it’s a start. 2. Ability to download click data for analysis – If you are a data junkie like me, then this is probably the most vexing missing item from the Bit.ly product. For you techies out there, there is probably already some way to get to this data through an api, but for the rest of us technically challenged folk, we need something easy. So, how about a way to download a CSV file for any date range? Please include make all the data fields available. It would be interesting to see things like clicks versus the different meta tag categories. 1. More detail on “who” is clicking – The Betaworks guys are pretty smart, so there may be some nuanced privacy issues preventing this. None the less, it would be great to have more detail on who exactly is clicking on my links. I realize this is probably a non-trivial technical project, but I’ve seen other link shorteners like twitclicks.com include at least a guess as to who is clicking. Whether you are using Twitter for marketing or professional purposes, knowing who clicked is going to get you one step closer to that next sell, next deal or next professional opportunity. Even if none of this is on the roadmap, how about a detail breakout of stats in the Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct category of referring sites
