By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Let’s talk about the inner workings of Twitter for a minute or almost two.

Comments and links go in, clicks and tracking metrics come out the other end. Somewhere in between each tweet is digested in one of the four Twitter cow stomachs. Or something like a stomach that is made of 72% water.

As part of this process there is a metabolic clock that is ticking the from the time a tweet enters the system. After doing some split testing of tweets with popular keywords and tag phrases like “ipad”, “tablet” and “droid” the time that it takes from ingestion to expulsion is about 1 minute and 50 seconds.

Once this time is over the remaining clicks on the links in the tweet are circled by late arrivals like flies. It really doesn’t matter where the content of the tweet comes from or where the content linked to was published. It the Twitter message is formed in an appealing way it will be clicked through during this time.

This is not to say, either, that the content in the tweet needs to be fresh, only relevant. The tweet needs to merely meet the requirements of the topic that any Twitter user wants to be reading about that time. So content that is months old or even years, if relevant to the meme at hand can also have a another almost two minutes of fame.

Related articles by Zemanta

• An illustration of why I reserved my own name on Twitter (jamesfallows.theatlantic.com)
• How to Use Twitter Search to Supplement your Job Search (ybpguide.com)
• TweetRl.com – Monetizing Your Own Links Socially (killerstartups.com)
• Nuts and bolts update (artsjournal.com)