Enjoy!

Earlier I was out with a friend and took a quick video of the storm in action. It’s a little long and not terribly exciting, but skip through it and you’ll see a puppy, us, and a lot of snow.

Quickly reading this article on TechCrunch about the new Tweetdeck update (my absolute favorite Twitter client), one section caught my eye and got me thinking:

You can now view more photos and videos inside TweetDeck, meaning that for some users Tweetdeck is going to start being the way they interface with rich media. Clicking on links to Youtube videos will now show the video in a TweetDeck preview window. Flickr image links will also now open in a preview, along with pictures from Posterous, Mobypicture and Twitgoo. Users can also upload to Mobypicture.

In other words, heavy Tweetdeck users are going to start finding they use their browser less to upload media to Twiter [sic] apps.

My question for the Web is this: how will this affect analytics? I know that on my blog, I can detect if a person is referred to my site from a client, but how will YouTube, Flickr, and even Twitter itself calculate analytics for content that comes from the API, instead of the Web site?

Now clearly, I’m not an analytics guy, by any means. But I do know that all the talk about Twitter peaking has gotten people talking about whether Twitter is a unique case of people actually accessing the site far more from third-party clients than via the actual Web interface. Perhaps people are simply using clients now, the argument goes, so hits aren’t showing up in site analytics. I dunno, kind of makes sense to me.

So how will this affect sites like YouTube and Flickr, in particular? Now that more and more content is driven by Twitter and more and more people are using Tweetdeck, will this result in lost site traffic by those sites? If this becomes a long-term trend, how will they find a way of getting these analytics? And how will they persuade advertisers that it’s still worth it to advertise on the site? After all, if people are using a client to watch a YouTube video, they certainly aren’t seeing any of the ads on YouTube.com. Who’s going to come up with the next big thing in analytics? Looks like it might be necessary sooner, rather than later.

[techcrunch]