Image via CrunchBase

Twitter is endlessly fascinating not only for its social and marketing implications but for all the ingenious applications people keep coming up with to make it more trackable, manageable and just plain fun. Here are a couple of tools we have been playing around with here at Bailey Gardiner.

With only 140 characters to get your message across, shortened URLs are essential for sharing links on Twitter while still having room for your post. We’ve been looking at two of the most popular – bit.ly and Su.pr.

bit.ly is the shortener that comes loaded on Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Once you sign up for a bit.ly account here, you can track how many people click the link you tweeted.  You can send the link and your Twitter post from your bit.ly homepage and it automatically adds the link to your “history” so you can see how many people click through.

To simplify this process you can add a Sidebar Bookmarklet from the bit.ly site to your toolbar (on a Mac you just drag it over. You PC people are on your own, sorry.) Then when you go to a site you want to share, you just click on the Sidebar link and it opens up on top of the page you want to send out with the URL already shortened and a box for you to write your tweet post. Easier than copying the URL, going to your bit.ly homepage and then pasting the link into the shortener.

If you mostly work from Tweetdeck you can add your API Key to your Tweetdeck Settings. Just click on this link at the bit.ly tools page and it walks you through it. It will then add your links sent from Tweetdeck to your bit.ly homepage history. Doesn’t appear that Seesmic has this feature yet.

Another bit.ly feature I have been playing with is the Preview Plugin for Firefox (see sample above). It expands bit.ly links on web pages so you can see the full title and info like how many people have clicked in the link, etc. before you decide to click through or not. This is a pretty cool Firefox extension. It works (most of the time) when looking at your followers page on Twitter too. Simplifies the screening process for following back.

Su.pr works in a similar manner to bit.ly. Sign up for your own account and then you can post tweets from your Su.pr dashboard and track click throughs. You can also add a Su.pr bookmark to your toolbar (like bit.ly) so that you can send out a Twitter post from a website you want to share rather than have to go to your dashboard.

Su.pr was developed by the folks at Stumbleupon with the help of Tim Ferris (yeah, he’s that 4-Hour Workweek guy. Still haven’t mastered that), so it has the added benefit of also sharing your links with your Stumbleupon account, simplifying the process a bit. You can read Tim’s early preview post about it here. Su.pr provides the following tools:

• schedule your posts
• see click-thoughs in real time
• see how many retweets you got
• track your click throughs on Stumbleupon
• track your most popular
• learn the best time to post a Tweet based on your click through history (really like this feature)

I think both shorteners offer great tools to help us learn about our followers, particularly what they like and don’t like. You can’t go wrong with either, but they each have their strengths. bit.ly is ubiquitous so if you just rely on it, all your data is in one spot. However, I do think I have reached more people with Su.pr because of the added Stumbleupon feature. I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to Stumble every link I send out, but according to my Su.pr stats I have had more than 15K stumbles in just a month of usage. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs.

What, if anything, are you using? What do you like or dislike about it?