Posted @ 4:50 PM on January 23, 2009 by @KyleGraham

I’m a BIG fan of Google Reader.  It helps me sift through mountains of data in minutes.  It’s literally my portal to the web.  One of my biggest uses of it is to keep track of anyone who talks about me or one of my projects around the web.  And earlier today, I read a post over at Slaw.ca about TwitClicks.  The author had some great things to say about us, but he brought up an important question about TwitClicks that I realized I’ve never fully explained regarding the “see the specific user who clicks on twitter links” feature: 

In short, he asked, ‘Do I REALLY need to know “WHO” clicked on my Twitter links?’ and more importantly, ‘What do I do with all that data?’

Well here’s my take on it all:

Realizing that Twitter is a great tool for connecting with your blog readers and followers, I created TwitClicks to help people prioritize these efforts.  As social media evolves, “information overload” will increase and online business owners will continue to become more and more fragmented in their efforts to succeed.  I’ll illustrate:  Picture the web before search engines came along.  There was a TON of data out there, but until there were search engines, there was no good way to sort through it all.

Well with the dawn of Web 2.0 and user-contributed data, the amount of information on the web literally exploded…way faster than search engines can keep up, so more and more tools like Google Reader, PopUrls.com, and others are starting to arrive to assist in the “filtering” of all this data.  

Now that social media has gone main-stream and EVERYONE is now talking about it, it’s clear that 2009 will see an even further spike in the amount of information available online which will create an even further demand for tools that help filter this data.

One more example: We all love twitter, but do you ever get a little overwhelmed about all the people talking about their cats, or their ‘visit to the doctor’?  As a result, some say, ‘who care’s’, or ‘twitter sucks’, but what they’re feeling is really a symptom of the larger issue:  And that is, Twitter is great! but it doesn’t do such a great job at letting people FILTER their data.

Ok, so back to the question at hand, “Do I REALLY need to know “WHO” clicked on my Twitter links?”  The answer, in short is…Yes…Yes you do.  TwitClicks helps users, particularly online marketers, to better determine WHO to focus their efforts on in their online strategy, whether it’s determining who to network with or knowing how to refine their tweets for maximum effect, and the like.

Without filtering tools like TwitClicks, Google.com, or Google Reader, as information on the internet continues to grow, users will become more and more overwhelmed with what we all know of as “information overload.”  In other words, they have too much data to sort through.

In a future post, I’ll go into more details as how you can use this new-found wealth of Twitter-data to better optimize your marketing, your networking, and so much more with Twitter.

What do you think?