But the original links will be displayed on Twitter.com

Oct 11, 2011 16:11 GMT  ·  By

Twitter has announced that it has started wrapping all links on the site with its own t.co URL shortener. This means that any link, regardless of length, will be going through t.co, there will be no more direct links to anything else inside Twitter messages.

Twitter has been working towards this for quite a while and launched its URL shortener, in a rather controversial move, more than a year ago. But, until now, only links longer than 20 characters were shortened.

This meant that short links, from other services such as Bit.ly or Google's goo.gl, passed through unchanged. This will no longer be the case.

"We're about to start wrapping all URLs regardless of their length with the t.co URL wrapper," Twitter announced in a tweet.

"As of October 10, 2011 the t.co URL wrapper automatically wraps all links submitted to Twitter, regardless of length. This includes so-called URLs without protocols," the documentation page for the feature reads now.

It's easy enough to check this, just look at any tweet on the site now. You'll probably not notice anything wrong, bit.ly links will be there, goo.gl links will be there and longer ones will show up abbreviated.

But if you look at the link underneath, you'll notice that they're all, in fact, t.co links.

Twitter, because it has access to t.co data, displays the original URL, even if it is actually shortened, on the site meaning that, for most people, the changes are invisible.

But every click on any link on Twitter will have to go through t.co before reaching its destination.

On the one hand, this will mean that users are a bit safer. If it spots a malware ridden link, it can block it across the site with one move. On the other, it gets to know exactly who clicks on what links and how many times.