Twitter—the wildly popular “micro-blogging” service—is making a giant impact on the internet, and joining the ranks of internet giants by doing so. If you’ve watched any cable news program in the last year, you’re probably already familiar with how it is helping to cure us all of the reckless habit of using sentences longer than 140 characters—this one is 163! (E-Gasp.) But, the lesser-known—and possibly more important—impact is how Twitter is helping to improve the traffic tracking tools online.

The Back Story

Twitter is a brilliant little shoehorn. Its 140 character limit was originally built into the system so that the service would play nicely when ‘tweets’ were sent to mobile phones as text messages—which, at the time, already had a 140 character limit. The mobile phone text message character restriction is now disappearing rather quickly as new phone platforms, which are not limited by small screens and tiny data transfer—like the iPhone and Droid, make their way into texters hands.

But Twitter will keep the 140 character limit even though the original reason for it is disappearing. The restriction has made Twitter the media darling, and it has been the cornerstone for the new standard of quick, straight-forward,... (read more...)