Links on Twitter result in "amazing traffic" ...
While reading the TechCrunch article on Twitter/iOS integration I was struck by the following paragraph:
Sarver cited a recent stat the team behind Quora gave which said that every tweet going out from their service results in an average of 30 clicks back to Quora. Again, that’s on average for all links sent across the entire spectrum of Quora and Twitter users. “It’s an amazing amount of traffic,” Sarver noted, clearly suggesting that all iOS apps could potentially see the same type of thing.
Several 106ers have mentioned that Twitter's primary utility is as a content/link distribution system; Sarver's statement corroborates that point of view.
I'm not surprised. People check Twitter while in line at the supermarket, waiting for the check at lunch, or when just wanting to kill a few minutes. It's 'down time' that lends itself to investigating links that are already cryptically named (to take up fewer characters) that are recommended by other people who have demonstrated (by virtual of their presence in your feed) that the articles and links they post might be of interest to you who may be reading it.
On the other hand, it's like a box of chocolates, especially with shortened URLs: You never know what you're going to get.
It's really hard when curating content to keep the quality high.
To be fair, if I find that clicking cryptolinks lands me somewhere I don't like often, I'll be likely to stop following the person or entity posting them.
Which is what I end up doing too. Bless Twitter, where follows are not forever.
We'll use that model for PandaWhale too once we roll out follows...
