The latest Net Effect magazine from Stompernet had an article about tracking the links you put out on Twitter and various other places on the net, written by Paul Colligan. The service he recommends is BudURL.

I signed up for it tonight and did a little testing, and it's pretty sweet. It not only counts the clicks, it also gives you a live "clickstream" showing the clicks as they happen, where they came from and the IP address of the people clicking on it. There's something addicting about being able to watch the clicks happen in realtime, and seeing where they come from.

I posted a test link on Twitter and started getting clicks on it within 15 seconds. I've got a total of 12 clicks in about 15 minutes, which isn't a huge number, but considering it's 9:30pm here on the west coast, it's not the ideal time to be putting out links.

I was going to record a video showing how this works, but seeing as how Paul Colligan already made one I figured why reinvent the wheel? Here's Paul's intro to the service: