In fact, according to Networked Insights' data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was "Brady," but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady - supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as "Mrs. Brady" or perhaps "Lady Brady" - than about the New England Patriots quarterback.

Though it may not be entirely surprising that commercials constitute the bulk of online chatter during the event, it's astonishing to see that TV commercials make up some 42% of all Super Bowl-related online chatter. Although New York Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw scored what Super Bowl history may record as the most awkward game winning touchdown - slowly being seated on the goal line after trying to stop himself short at the 1-yard line - his maneuver only elicited a minor wave compared with Mrs. Brady.

A spokesperson for Networked Insights told RWW this afternoon that part of the reason for the lopsided topic mix may have to do partly with the game. It was a low-scoring game with only one interception, whose outcome was only sealed when the clock reached zero. It may have been such a nail-biter, in other words, that true football fans may have been biting their nails rather than tapping their keys.

"It's not surprising to see viewers' commentary of Super Bowl advertisements surpass those of the game itself," Dan Neely, NI's CEO, tells RWW this afternoon. "Brands can partly attribute this social lift as a by-product of a low-scoring game that allowed viewers to discuss the commercials."

A word about the volume of tweets: Naturally, NI's tracking included tweets that included the hashtag #superbowl. NI estimates tweets to that hashtag alone to have numbered around 1.6 million, though it will have updated, hardened data later in the week. That's as many tweets as are normally archived in a single day, the NI spokesperson tells us.

As an analysis firm for advertisers, NI itself was concerned more with the commercials than the football. Gaining the most overall viewer response among celebrity endorsers was the tattooed, underwear-wearing veteran of what "far'ners" call football, David Beckham. His shorts reached out to 39% of folks talking about just the Super Bowl commercials (as opposed to the game), according to NI's figures. This is what NI means by "share of value." Sentiment among chatting consumers was 23% more positive than negative, suggesting the H&M undies went over well. Coming in second was Clint Eastwood, whose two-minute ad that may have been for Chrysler but may really have been for the city of Detroit, had 21% "share of value," while 9% of the discussion was more positive than negative.

Though NI gives Chrysler kudos for choosing Eastwood, it notes that the resulting chatter was three times more about him than about Chrysler.

By comparison, as much as 28% of folks chatting about Super Bowl topics during halftime were discussing Madonna's halftime show. Their discussion constituted 32% of Super Bowl-related social traffic by volume. Sentiment for Madonna was generally negative (-21%), with tweets about her staying relatively short, with a particularly negative peak towards the end where the lights converged to reveal the message, "WORLD PEACE." By contrast, sentiment for her on-stage co-star MIA - whose little birdie expressed exactly the opposite sentiment - ran generally positive at +6%, commanding 3% of the discussion. The star of the halftime show ended up being Nicki Minaj, whom perhaps more viewers recognized than Clint Eastwood. Minaj commanded a 7% share of value, with 26% of it more positive than negative.

Breaking down just the Madonna comments, MI found that as much as 2% of this subgroup were making comments about her age (53). This group was split down the middle as to whether she looked great for her age, with the negative group making snarky comments about such things as her "veiny" arms. Sentiment turned positive when she began singing "Like a Prayer," which was originally released in 1989, though it tipped downward to -11% after she began her latest single, "Give Me All Your Luvin.'" (NI does not appear to have data regarding consumer sentiment about its spelling.)

"The takeaway for networks, producers, and sports leagues is the need to create multiple engagement points around content that is in sync with the interests of a target audience," states NI's Dan Neely. "Going forward, the winners will be the programs that leverage social technology to drive participation."

What the Twitterers of the world may have missed Sunday night was the terrific sense of community and shared excitement. Just the NFL Experience - the week-long slate of activities in downtown Indianapolis among football fans who love the game and who keep their phones mostly in their pockets except to take pictures - pulled in some 265,000 people over a nine-day period, according to the latest estimates.

As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, Twitter plans to launch sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.

Anderson, who made the comments last weekend at a social media conference at Columbia University in New York, said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. Twitter already offers similar services to its advertisers.

"Whilst there are numerous analytics tools available which can look into Twitter in depth, having an analytics platform embedded within the network itself is likely to improve the quality of future campaigns as a whole," Pete Goold, managing director of Punch said in a statement. "This development may also be part of Twitter's strategy to try and persuade more brands to invest in the platform from a marketing perspective, since the pool of information and insights which could be available through Twitter is astronomical."

Twitter's open API has been widely praised and has allowed companies like HootSuite to develop platforms that not only help users manage Twitter campaigns, but analyze the impact and reach of individual tweets. Recently, however, Twitter has made moves to compete with the third party providers.

In addition to the anticipated analytical tools, Twitter acquired and then redesigned TweetDeck, a popular HootSuite competitor. The redesign mimicked many of HootSuite's more popular features, including a browser based platform.

Of course, seeing is believing: Twitter has been promising analytics tools for at least two years, with an executive once saying they would be available by the end of 2010.

Mobile analytics company Flurry has been tracking the progression of iOS and Android application penetration across the world. No surprise, the United States is the most mature smartphone market on the planet. The rest of the world is catching up. China and South Korea both have made great leaps in 2011 to bring smart devices to users and where there is a smartphone, there is an app for that.

The U.S. has the highest install base of Android and iOS devices running apps in the world at 109 million. China is second at 35 million with the United Kingdom third at 17 million. The mobile app market is by no means saturated. Flurry still sees lots of room for it to grow.

Flurry encourages app developers to look overseas for potential growth markets. For instance, in China there are 122 million middle class adults age 15-64 that are not using iOS or Android. In the U.S. that number is 91 million (figuring a 200 million potential smartphone user base or about 60% of the population).

This brings us to the "addressable market." Right now, the most mature markets are the ones that have the highest penetration per, population. That means that the U.S., Sweden, Hong Kong and Sweden are the most mature. At the same time, the U.S. still has lots of potential to grow in iOS and Android adoption. Take a look at the chart below.

This chart is a little confusing if you do not know exactly what you are looking at. Here is the explanation from Flurry:

• The vertical axis measures our total addressable audience (TAM), which we define as adults, 15 - 64, who are at least middle-class. The TAM per country is represented by the larger, light blue circles. The U.S., with the largest light blue circle, has the largest TAM at 200 million. The horizontal axis shows percent penetration, which is the active user (iOS or Android device that used an app over the last 30 days) divided by the TAM

Now that we have a look at the mature markets, which ones have the most potential? The light blue portions of the circles show the potential for the apps ecosystem to grow. In this chart, the U.S., Japan, China and India have the highest potential. Sweden and Hong Kong drop right off the map.

Expect developers to start focusing on more emerging markets in 2012. The U.S. may be the test bed for popular apps, but there is big money to be made overseas. Is your studio planning on taking advantage? Let us know in the comments.

There are other tools that involve "sentiment analysis," being able to examine what people are Tweeting about or the attitude they are expressing in their tweets. The tools in this article are mainly for more quantifiable metrics. We look at whether you need to pre-authorize the tool to access your Twitter account, how much customization is available on the reports displayed, if there is a fee to use the service and whether you will need something outside of your browser to do the analysis. Most of these are completely free, which is nice since you can experiment and see what makes the most sense for you.

You might also want to review an article that I wrote last month about 17 alternatives to Klout for other services that go beyond Twitter, or that attempt to measure some kind of reach or influence in social media.

The following tools are listed in the order of most to least useful, at least to my point of view. If I have omitted any of your favorites or have maligned or overhyped a tool that you use, please share your thoughts in the comments.

1. Twittercounter. You can produce your own graphs for up to three different twitter users, as long as you authenticate yourself first. You can see the number of followers and tweets for up to the past three months for free. You can get up to the past six months if you "pay with a retweet" and there are other metrics available for paid plans. Here you see a comparison of tweets from myself, Joe and Jon.

   

2. Tweetstats gives you less control over the graph axes but does give you plots for timelines of followers and retweets, as well as analysis of which Twitter posting software was used. You can zoom in to see the analysis of one month's worth of tweets.

   

   

3. Xefer tracks tweets by time of day and the week, and presents a very nice graph with the distribution as you can see below. The data is gathered via Yahoo Pipes and the Google Chart API, which is a nice touch showing you how you too can assemble your own analytics.

   

4. TwitGraph. Authentication of your account is required. This produces a number of different graphs, including the tweets per day over the last week and top words used in your tweets.

   
   

5. We wrote about PostPost several weeks ago here as an improved search tool. It also produces a timeline and requires both Twitter and email authentication. But the results weren't very current (on my tests they were missing the last week's worth of tweets).

6. Trendistic is a bit crude and somewhat inaccurate. It will show you a timeline of your past two days' worth of Tweets, along with a readout of what you actually tweeted.
   

"Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks," the announcement says. "We're also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products." Just like Google Analytics, Twitter's dashboard will be free for publishers.

The analytics dashboard has four navigation tabs. The first, 'Traffic,' plots the number of tweets linking to the publisher's site against the number of clicks on those links. The graph can be viewed for one day, the past week or the past month. The 'Tweets' tab shows all tweets containing links to the site as well as any tweets sent from the site's embedded Tweet Buttons. The administrator can retweet and reply to those tweets from within the dashboard. The 'Tweet Button' tab shows how much engagement the site gets from its Tweet Buttons, and the 'Content' tab shows the site's top-performing pages.

TechCrunch is reporting that Twitter's Director of Web Business Development, April Underwood, says that the data are cleaned up, with bots and spam removed. Twitter will also release an API for Web Analytics, allowing publishers to pull this extensive Twitter data into other analytics suites.

A Long Time Coming

There are loads of third-party Twitter analytics services out there, some of them built into full-fledged social media dashboards like HootSuite, but Twitter's entry into analytics has long been anticipated.

Twitter has recently acquired a series of analytics companies, and the chatter around those deals added up to a looming product release. In July 2010, we reported on several communications following Twitter's acquisition of Smallthought Systems - parent company of analytics tool Trendly - that suggested a new analytics product was imminent. Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett responded to us that the "whoop-la" was merely about "an existing analytics product that very few people see." We were not convinced.

Later that summer, we were able to confirm that Twitter was making a real-time analytics dashboard available to a small set of beta testers. Twitter then went silent with us about specifics; as Twitter's Carolyn Penner told us, "We've been talking about providing analytics since last December [2009], but have nothing to add at this time."

In the meantime, though, Twitter has provided analytics tools for advertisers. This is a clear need as Twitter scrambles to monetize, but the advertiser tools have been the only analytics available directly from Twitter until now.

This summer, Twitter acquired marketing intelligence startup BackType, which the Twitter Analytics announcement credits as a driving force behind the launch. Ryan Sarver, product manager for Twitter's platform/API team, tweeted his congratulations to that team today, saying he is "excited to see the @backtype team's hard work seeing the light of day."

Twitter Reveals Its True Influence

In August, Twitter took a big step toward cleaning up its analytics data by turning on its t.co short link wrapper for all tweeted links longer than 19 characters. T.co is still not fully implemented yet, but when it is, content providers on any platform will finally be able to accurately measure their referrals from Twitter. Prior to t.co, publishers would see different referrers if the clicks came from Twitter.com, Twitter's client apps, third-party apps or bounced off some link shortener first.

That's a very long tail, making Twitter referrals hard to measure. As a result of the confusion, Twitter was often discounted and discredited as a traffic referral source. But now that all tweeted links will go through t.co first, all clicks on Twitter links will come from one referrer. In short, Web publishers are just beginning to realize Twitter's full traffic potential.

With the launch of Twitter Web Analytics, publishers will now be able to accurately measure the impact of Twitter in both inbound and outbound directions. With over 100 million active users, a number that has grown by 105% just this year so far, publishers and Twitter users are about to find out for sure about the value of this service.

The Twitter list feature is good, but the Facebook Fan Pages should excite people manning the desks at brands and agencies. They've been clamoring for more functionality - and legitimacy - with Klout.

Fan pages often have some of the highest levels of engagement. Some of the biggest social media campaigns, like the Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like videos, depend on high levels of fan engagement on Facebook. But it's hard to measure the success of those campaigns beyond the number of new fans.

"This is the start of understanding engagement at more of a deeper level than just how many fans you have and how much money you spent on a campaign," Klout CEO Joe Fernandez says. "It's now about how much they care [about the brand] and who are these people, specifically."

The fan pages connection is one in a series of steps that Klout is taking to further its ability to provide functional data to brands and agencies in a social graph environment that often tips toward opacity and vagueness, says Fernandez. Earlier this month the company begin integrating Foursquare data.

This makes CoverCake's data set valuable to anyone interested in the market for books. Boopsie, a mobile book discovery app for libraries, has already integrated CoverCake's data using its API. The new analytics tools now allow users to find or track books using CoverCake's own website.

We've been covering some experiments in publishing lately, and Web technology has enabled rapid innovation in this quintessential pre-Web industry. CoverCake's interface and data science could help bring more precision to a new way of publishing.

The company's business focus, says Business Development Director Todd Gibson, is "primarily on publishers and authors," who derive the most direct benefits from this intelligence. The only way for the rapidly shifting industry to get smarter, he says, "is for them to figure out what people really like, outside of sales figures." The byproduct of that also happens to be an interesting book discovery tool for consumers.

The consumer appeal of these analytics tools is not as obvious as it is for a social service like Goodreads, which helps users discover new books through recommendations from their own social networks, as well as some original content like book lists and interviews. CoverCake lets readers see what books are popular now, as well as who's talking about them, but it's up to the user to filter the data to find what he or she is looking for. But for authors and publishers, CoverCake has an advantage over other enterprise analytics tools, because it's focused on the market that matters to them. Its dataset has limitations, but those can be an asset.

CoverCake's book discovery capabilities can be accessed through its free iOS app. The Android app offers more features, letting users filter by genre and see what books are trending in online conversations. Future versions will include analytics capabilities. The company is also working on an algorithm to separate out conversations about different editions and formats, enabling users to distinguish between print and e-books, for example.

As 2011 approaches, ReadWriteWeb takes a look back at 10 of the last year's most useful or promising Web tools for small and medium-sized businesses.

Billed as the Mint.com for small businesses, InDinero launched in early July and is a real-time financial dashboard for companies. The Y Combinator-backed startup is led by 20-year-old Jessica Mah, who got the idea for InDinero while she was selling items on eBay in middle school.

"I had no idea how much money I was actually making," Mah told us in July. Mah, who is obviously some kind of super-genius, graduated from UC Berkley's computer science program this year at the age of 19 and promptly began putting the finishing touches on the Web app, which closely resembles Mint.com.

InDinero is free for up to 50 transactions per month, $29.95 for up to 500, and $99.95 for an unlimited number of monthly transactions.

Rapportive

Depending on how readily available such details are, Rapportive will pull an avatar image, name, job title, recent tweets and links to any active social networking profiles the person may have. You can even connect with somebody on LinkedIn via Rapportive, without leaving Gmail.

Next page: No longer is there a barrier for even the smallest of businesses to begin accepting credit cards where ever they may be...

Square

Square may not be the only solution for taking credit card payments via mobile devices, but it certainly garnered the most buzz this year and has helped put mobile payments within reach of small businesses everywhere.

No longer is there a barrier for even the smallest of businesses to begin accepting credit cards where ever they may be: at a trade show, convention hall or in a store or cafe.

Google Apps

For SMBs and enterprise customers of Google Apps, an enormous number of new tools were made available this year, including Analytics, Places, Blogger, Picasa, Custom Search, Website Optimizer and Google Checkout, among many others.

Next page: It's hard to deny the emerging importance of real-time data to businesses of all sizes...

Real-time Analytics

On our ReadWriteBiz channel, we discussed how real-time analytics can benefit small businesses and covered one company that increased traffic by 300% using real-time data.

Flowtown

Launched in late 2009, social email marketing tool Flowtown really started to take off this year, raising $750,000 in funding and amassing over 15,000 customers.

Flowtown lets you import a list of email contacts and find out more information about each person via any social networking profiles they may have. Flowtown shows who's on Facebook, Twitter (including their Klout score) and LinkedIn and even includes details from Flickr or Amazon wish lists.

For businesses, this offers a whole new level of social insight into what was once just a list of email addresses collecting dust in a CSV file or database somewhere.

Next page: Businesses have an enormous amount of online data to keep track of...

iPad

Apple's breakthrough tablet computer was a huge hit among consumers this year, especially for things like reading and gaming. And while that was largely how the device was marketed, we also started to see it used for business purposes, especially in the financial services and technology industries.

Currently, there are over 1,750 iPad apps in the "Business" section of the App Store, and that doesn't even include the 1,640 apps found under "Productivity." Apple's Keynote, Pages and Numbers apps are all in the top 10 top-grossing apps in the store, and others like Remote Desktop Lite, Documents To Go, Box.net and PrintCentral have proven quite popular.

Another business function fulfilled by the iPad this year has been attending online meetings. GoToMeeting, WebEx and Fuze Meeting all have solid applications that make attending conference calls and meetings easy and, oddly, sort of enjoyable.

Geckoboard

Businesses have an enormous amount of online data to keep track of. Between Web analytics, social media metrics, email subscribers, CRM, customer support stats and project management, companies have at least half a dozen dashboards to log into and pull data from.

Geckoboard is an all-in-one dashboard for displaying all this data and more in one location, offering a comprehensive snapshot of one's business at a glance. It's designed in such a way that it can easily be displayed on a computer monitor, mobile device or large screen TV around the office. The Web app has some growing to do, particularly in terms of the breadth of data sources it supports, but considering it was just launched late this year, it's quite promising.

Next page: Numbers nine and 10

Mindflash

Mindflash is an online training system lets trainers build courses using PDFs, PowerPoint, Word docs and videos, and then invite trainees, who are later quizzed on their progress. It comes equipped with trainee progress reports, which show in real-time how each person is doing and who may need additional training.

The appeal for small businesses is two-fold: It automates many training-relating tasks, freeing up time and energy for other projects, and comes with a very affordable price tag. Mindflash is free to use for organizations with 10 or fewer trainees, and then ranges from $79 to $399 per month, depending on the number of trainees.

Spreadable

Spreadable encourages sharing of content by letting site owners create an embdeddable, all-in-one sharing widget from which visitors can email a link to friends or post it to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a host of other popular social networking sites. Of course, at the end of the day, any content has to be genuinely interesting or useful to people in order to really take off, but Spreadable is one tool that can help enable its proliferation.

Spreadable comes to us from the Grasshopper Group, the team that developed the Grasshopper virtual phone system and Chargify platform for recurring billing. It's currently in beta and available for free.

What did we leave off this list that you would have included? Let us know in the comments.

Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr's proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter's full feed, a data stream often referred to as the "Twitter firehose." Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more.

What that means for the service's end users is that you have the ability to parse Twitter analytics in a number of different ways. When you do a keyword search, Research.ly can identify the people talking about that word or phrase, and then you can drill down into the "Interest Graph" to splice the data even further by gender, sentiment, etc. or find related word clouds, hashtags, links, @names and more. It can even pull up related media, like photos from Twitpic or YouTube videos.

In addition, Research.ly has grouped Twitter users into various demographics (think "moms," "CEOs," "engineers," etc.), which means users can now direct the service to return very precise answers to your queries. For example, you could discover things like Mommy bloggers in San Francisco tweeting about human rights or all the good things said about Coke and bad things said about Pepsi.

Account owners, who are presumably accessing the service using a business or brand's Twitter account, can even drill down to see the degrees of separation between themselves and a particular user and how they are connected.

Research.ly's pricing will be $99 per seat per month or $499 per seat per month for its premium features. We've been given an account to try but have had access to it for just a day, so we can't make a final recommendation or endorsement as to its capabilities, but we're definitely excited about the potential.

One of the interesting features of DataSift's FSDL is the ability to build new "super rules" based on existing ones. You'll also be able to share your rules so that others can build on your work. Another great benefit of this tool is that it searches beyond Twitter and includes MySpace, WordPress, and Six Apart as sources.

I created a DataSift stream today to look for information about "DDoS attacks," a stream that was fairly easy to put together with the quick reference guide. I was struck how quickly the information was available for me to review (thank you WebSockets). I also quickly realized that I had to refine my search so I wasn't pulling all the tweets on "kiddos" and the like. But I can certainly see this tool being a good one to have in our arsenal. Um, DataSift that is. Not denial of service attacks. Clearly.

DataSift also has an API that will allow third-party developers to consume the filtered data, and DataSift plans to have an App Store to help encourage people to build tools with the platform.

Although Twitter has indicated it will launch its own real-time analytics dashboard, that feature has yet to make an appearance. And as Marshall Kirkpatrick noted with his story on Needlebase earlier today, there are a number of interesting analytics tools being released in the meantime.

"It's like Google Analytics for your documents," according to Scribd. And indeed, Scribd Stats provides a similar set of tools. The analytics include an overview of all the documents you've uploaded, as well as the ability to drill down into information about individual items.

As Scribd notes, this sort of information is incredibly valuable to publishers, "knowing how people are finding my content, where they're coming from, and which content is fueling the most social activity." Pointing to the heat map that accompanies docs and tracks which pages had users abandon reading, Fast Company asks if Scribd Stats could "change the way we write." Certainly the new analytics will be able to provide a great deal of data about readership and response.

Scribd Stats are rolling out slowly to all users, and will be accessible via the "My Stats" dashboard.

PostRank keeps track of how content gets passed around on sites like Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Reddit and many more. The service's ability to track reader sharing and discussion on Facebook has been hampered, however, by Facebook's being closed off to outside data collection. This new solution, a Facebook app that publishers authenticate with, is a smart way to make progress towards solving that problem.

I personally am of the belief that the most valuable way to use PostRank is to use it to track other peoples' content, to discover emerging news from the hinterland of niche blogs, but despite the rise of world-changing publishing and subscription technologies - most publishers remain interested primarily in broadcasting and navel gazing. Content marketing optimization is a much better business to be in than the systematic illumination of well-blogged glimmers of insight into the human condition or any other topic. (If you are interested in using PostRank to better understand and discover highlights from other peoples' content, visit postrank.com/main.)

Details on the offering will be announced on the Postrank Blog this morning and the app can be seen live on Facebook.

And I think I have a terrific pitch for the media outlets that like to run huge social-media-is-killing-us-all headlines. Here's how it goes:

When you're playing Minesweeper, Solitaire or Angry Birds, it's a little difficult to convince yourself that you're being productive. But when you're tinkering with Google Analytics, it's a much easier sell.

In other words, it's only a matter of time before we hear the first reports of starvation deaths among Analytics users.

I am available for media interviews.

More Noise to Signal.

"I guess Oscar Wilde was right, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery," Bit.ly's John Borthwick told us in response. "They took all the basic features and copied from bit.ly." That is true for the user interface, but in the larger context of both companies' offerings, there are significant differences.

Additional features Goo.gl offers include browser and OS level breakdown of link clickers and an auto-generated QR code for every link shortened. Google's service does not offer a public API yet, but the company says it will in the future. Bit.ly offers a reporting API, and perhaps most importantly it offers publishers their own branding. Borthwick says there are now 4,000 white-label deals in place with Bit.ly. This site publishes through the URL RWW.to, for example, which looks better than publishing through a Google URL.

Many startups have built URL shorteners in recent years. The most interesting have been focused on analyzing the content on shortened links and offering the resulting data programmatically.

One independent study by Web-monitoring company WatchMouse this spring confirmed Goo.gl's claims that it is the fastest and most robust URL shortener on the market.

Imagine Goo.gl data integrated with Google Analytics. That would be a powerful combination. Goo.gl is already integrated in the publishing flow from Google's RSS and advertising platform FeedBurner to Twitter. In theory that could prove uniquely compelling as well.

Web analytics company WebTrends reported on the statement and offered details based on an interview with Hoffman on its company blog today. We reported first this Summer that such a product was coming "soon" and was based on the word of a startup Twitter had acquired called DabbleDB/Trendly. Twitter's PR lead Sean Garrett person said our report was incorrect, but it appears we may only have been wrong about the timing.

"The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept," Justin Kistner writes on the WebTrends blog, "in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more. The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics."

"This is a big announcement from Twitter," Kistner opines, "as analytics is critical to not only justifying marketing budget (something Twitter marketers have struggled to prove), but also to improve marketing efforts."

Twitter is working hard and fast on monetization, and a solid analytics offering should help make more companies comfortable with use of the service. Further comment from Twitter is forthcoming, the company says. Will it really be free to everyone? If not just to users of the elusive "business toolkit," that would be huge. If just to that group, it would still be a big deal long term, as access to Twitter's business offerings slowly opens up.

Update: Twitter's Carolyn Penner responded to our inquiry as follows: "We've been talking about providing analytics since last December, but have nothing to add at this time."

Beta Testers Approve

Andrew Nystrom, "social media Dude" for RedBull, and Brad Nelson, social media at Starbucks, both confirmed on Twitter in response to this report that they are beta testing the analytics service and are finding it "very useful."

Note that both of these companies are participants in Twitter's sponsored Tweets program. If only advertisers are allowed to use Twitter analytics, instead of analytics being open to everyone in order to encourage advertisement, that's going to make a whole lot of people unhappy.

Beyond Broadcast

Those Twitter-using companies will be served poorly, however, if they focus exclusively on a quantitative analysis of Twitter's business worth as a broadcast mechanism. As a living, breathing real-time conversation, participated in by leading innovators and business people throughout many sectors, Twitter probably offers the most business value as a listening and business development tool.

None the less, many organizations will be very excited to see an analytics dashboard if it is implemented well.

It's not hard to imagine an analogy that works like this: Twitter analytics for Free is to Twitter advertising, as Google Analytics for Free is to Google advertising.