Yeah – I bet that headline got your attention for a second. How could a URL be compared to a cookie? It takes a moment to get used to the idea, but that very concept was suggested by a couple articles I read today.

It all started when I got a spam with a short bitly URL embedded within. I became curious to know if there was a such thing as a bitly decoder, and surely there was! So that bitly URL mapped to a Twitter t.co URL. That was when I decided to delete the spam altogether. But I found this article about t.co URLs being useful for web analytics, and that article lead to this article which raised the question of this post’s headline. Read the articles and judge for yourself. Go through your own Tweets and web analytics and prove it out for yourself.