As we noted yesterday, Twitter isn’t so much a social network as a broadcast medium. For most Twitter users, broadcasting information mostly means sharing links. Whenever you share a link, however, there is always the lingering question if your followers haven’t already seen this link in their streams before. Thanks to Link Different, you can now easily check if any given link has already appeared in your followers’ streams.
Getting Started
To get started, simply head over to the project’s website, connect your Twitter account to Link Different and drag and drop the bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar. Then, whenever you want to share a link, simply click on the bookmark and Link Different will tell you how many of your followers have already seen this link in their stream. In addition, the service will also give you a bit.ly link.
Of course, you can never be absolutely certain that any of your Twitter followers actually saw a link – and there is also some value in repeated postings – but if you want to make sure that everything you post to Twitter is as original as possible, give Link Different a try.
This project is the work of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign grad student Eric Gilbert. Gilbert told us that Link Different, which performs a distributed crawl using Twitter’s APIs, should scale well for accounts with large follower numbers.
