That's pretty much an assumed feature of any URL shortener these days. Many folks use them precisely for that sort of analytics.

So.. it's click tracking. Big deal. The magic of HTML is that the link that's displayed (the original if shorter?) doesn't have to match the actual href.

To use the zombo.com example above, why can't Twitter use the "shortener" to track redirects in the link and display the actual? <a href="http://t.co/?r=zombo.com>http://zombo.com</a>;

They're already doing something similar with elided URLs, why not with short ones?

I'm not familiar with the API--this of course assumes are tweets returned as html, not text.

>it's also click tracking

My understanding is they don't do this (at least publicly) yet (http://www.dnxpert.com/2011/06/08/twitter-officially-launche...)

I recently found a t.co link in my server logs but thankfully was able to track statistics by looking at information provided by the bitly URL it forwarded to.