Just in time for Social Media Week, which kicks off in Chicago Monday, Twitter has slowly begun to roll out a free dashboard with precious web analytics data to a select group of users.
This is fantastic news for both power users and those leery of the Twit-machine: Both camps will be able to measure exactly how much interest each tweet generates in terms of traffic, retweets, and just how each 140-character message ripples out after it's sent.
In Twitter's announcement for this welcome news, Christopher Golda, a member of Twitter's product team explained why it's taken so long for this tool to be released.
"People have struggled to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites," writes Golda in a blog post, "in part because web analytics software hasn’t evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals."
The dashboard goes public to all users "within the next few weeks."
Read the full announcement here.
Side note: Speaking of Twitter, and in the spirit of Social Media Week, if you want to see just how far the service has come in half a decade, check out ReadWriteWeb's peek back at what Twitter (then known as twttr) looked like when it began. It's completely unrecognizable.
