Twitter today announced their brand new web analytics system, which will be a key indicator for publications, blogs and PRs to find out how much their site or article has been shared, how many clicks it received and how effective the official tweet button has been.

The development comes of the back of Twitter’s acquisition of BackType - once a third party tool used to measure how many times a URL was shared on Twitter and Facebook, how many clicks the link received on those platforms and what the impression volume was.

BackType is still live, however the search now returns results from BackTweets - a tool by the same developers that lists all the tweets containing a certain link. Still useful of course.

BackType is a great tool, however there were reliability issues at times and the service was limited unless you signed up. The news that Twitter has developed their new analytics system of the back of this means the tool should be very well polished and free to use.

‘Twitter Web Analytics’ is being rolled out this week to a few pilot partners, however it shouldn’t be long before it is offered to all site owners. There is good news for developers too, as the API will be made available at some point in the future.

Click here to see Twitter’s official announcement. This has also been posted on David’s personal blog.

This week Twitter was rife with people calling out LinkedIn for changing its privacy settings so it could use information about you in third-party advertising.

I saw two or three people in my network tweeting about this supposedly underhand behaviour, and immediately logged onto LinkedIn to change my privacy settings.  After all, you trust people in your network, don’t you?  Worryingly, however, this also changed my perceptions of LinkedIn – and not in a good way.

Learning from experience

Why does this keep happening?  Facebook has come under fire again and again for making changes to its privacy settings, even reaching the desks of US regulator the Federal Trade Commission in 2009 thanks to a complaint from a consumer rights group.

Partly, this is unavoidable.  Social networks are young companies and services and clearly they need to make changes to their business and service models as they go.  A good example is the launch of the activity stream announced by Twitter this week.  This updates the way Twitter serves you information about who’s retweeting, favouriting and following you, and so far, everyone seems happy enough about it.

But some changes – particularly those relating to privacy – don’t go down as well.  In the main, these public outcries are driven by a conflict between the urgency with which social networks run their businesses, and the amount of time it takes to communicate effectively to hundreds of millions of geographically dispersed users, particularly on sensitive subjects.

Governments have learned this lesson well over centuries, and often take decades to persuade countries to consider, then adopt, controversial policies.  Of course, with fierce competition between social networks, they don’t have decades or even years to push through change.  They see the world in terms of weeks and months.

LinkedIn blogged today about its new social advertising policies.  “We told you about this already,” they claim, with some justification.  LinkedIn did publish two blog post in June flagging changes to the privacy policy and the launch of social ads.  That and some outreach to industry blogs seems to have been the extent of LinkedIn’s communication of these changes.

The value of trust for social networks

So far, the big social networks seem to be taking the view that, so long as they don’t lose members in droves, they can probably get away with pushing through changes like this.  However, with public trust at such a premium after years of relentless focus on banking, politicians’ expenses and media malpractice, I’d argue that social networks could benefit from being seen as trustworthy sources of information.

And with that in mind, perhaps making a bit more effort to explain the changes they plan to make, and being seen to listen to users feelings before they implement changes, might not be such a bad idea.

Last week, Twitter announced a very useful addition to its search functionality. Searching on Twitter will now show up top images and videos; with the option to view plenty more in a visually pleasing gallery, should the search term be popular enough.

We are big fans of photography at 33 Digital and many of us use phone apps to our pictures with the world on Twitter. But images and video shared on Twitter have further importance in our work. We don’t just search what is being said about our clients, we also check what images and videos people post - using services such as PicFog. Thanks to Twitter, our job just became a little easier.

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PR Week’s in-depth feature last month on the newest hot social network, Quora, asked the question: is it the next Twitter?

Having spent four months on Quora, my experience of it is much different to that of Twitter, even in Twitter’s early days when things there were much quieter. Quora is, in many ways, more like LinkedIn than Twitter. The content is valuable but lighter in volume and looks more like a long tail than a swarm.

Quora’s long tail of content provides an ongoing stream of interaction from an extended social network, from people who you probably do not know but who you have shared interests with.

Once you follow a thread on Quora, you will receive alerts, usually via email, whenever people post a new comment to that thread. The end result is that, even if you only follow a handful of topics that take your fancy, you get a slow but steady stream of interesting discussions coming through to you in a way that looks and feels a lot like the value you get from being a member of a good LinkedIn Group.

You can use Quora in a Twitter-like way, by surfing the live feed on your homepage on Quora.com, but as more and more people begin to graze, Quora is visibly slowing down and its long tail does seem to be adding more value to the community than how it looked at first.

If you have any interests that you’ve chosen to follow through by joining a LinkedIn Group, then try looking up the same interests on Quora and see what this grazing long tail of interestingness looks like, and let us know if you think it works for you or not. We think Quora will be here to stay, and the fact that it’s a slow-burner will be to its advantage.

Twitter is in the process of adding an official ‘retweet’ option to its service.

It’s very early days yet - most people haven’t received the option, including some in the 33 office - but it’s already created a lot of debate (TechCrunch and PC Mag for example) because it’s fundamentally different from the organic way that the community has popularised retweets

How-to retweet (before and after)

Originally, a manual retweet or one by a Twitter client, will copy the whole tweet and add the phrase “RT @name” at the beginning of the tweet*. They also let you add commentary to the tweet if you’d like to add your own perspective.

The new approach won’t let you edit a Tweet. Instead, the whole message will be pushed verbatim into your follower’s stream.

The original approach won’t be outlawed but is likely to shrink or disappear as more clients adopt the new feature.

Why is retweet being changed?

There are many reasons that Ev Williams explains on his blog but here are a couple:

1. To reduce noise, you’ll only ever see a retweeted message once. This will keep your stream a little quieter, but sounds like it will have a negative impact on the way we currently gauge the importance of a message that is popular and being retweeted. Noise can be distracting but in case of breaking events, it can also be an important sign to take notice.

2. You’ll be able to hide retweets from people. For example, if I only wanted to see Dom’s personally authored tweets then I could hide his retweets.

Our initial reaction…

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