14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has made an expected announcement, it will be introducing its own URL-shortening service. What’s more, the new service will be used all the time, regardless of whether a link is already shortened with a third-party service. Twitter’s URL shortener will use the t.co domain and will eventually be rolled out to everyone this summer.
“Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers,” Twitter’s Sean Garrett wrote in a blog-post announcement.
“Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets,” he said.
“[W]e're taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We're testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts,” he announced.
Twitter’s t.co will be used in all tweets on the site or through third-party apps. It will not be very visible, though, as the links will be presented to the users either in their entirety or truncated, or as the page title. Twitter hasn’t decided which of these paths it will choose. The short URL’s will be used in SMSs to make sure the message stays within the 160-character limit. All links, even the ones that have been shortened already, will be wrapped with t.co.
Twitter says there are a couple of reasons for doing this. First, Twitter points out, it adds a layer of security to the links on the site. All links will be checked against a blacklist of known malware or phishing sites and a warning will be displayed if they are deemed unsafe. The second reason has to do with Twitter’s recent strategy of ‘plugging the holes’ - providing first-party options for some of the more basic and central capabilities of the service. It has started offering its own mobile apps and said it planned to offer a URL shortener as well.
However, there are a couple of other motivations as well. Twitter says it will offer those using a business account analytics data based on the shortened links. It also plans to use the data for its upcoming ad system, Promoted Tweets. Twitter’s URL shortener is currently in testing with just a few accounts and will be made available to developers later on. The company plans to roll it out on the site, thus to all users, this summer, though no specific timeline was given.