Twitter taking new approach on URLs, Plans its own URL Shortner “t.co”
Twitter has announced that the company is making several changes to the way the links are shown to its users. Soon the micro blogging site will have its own URL shortener “t.co” on all the web content shared on Twitter network. The company says this is an effort to prevent any malware and phishing attacks generated through its out going links.
Sean Garrett of Twitter said on twitter blog that right now the t.co service is in testing stage and only few users have access to it while full rollout will happen later this summer on all the links on twitter.com and twitter apps and will be auto wrapped with t.co links. After its full release t.co short URLs will replace twitter’s existing twt.tl short URL which they were using to shorten links in direct messages for several months.
The first major change that you will see on Twitter this summer is although the links will be wrapped up with t.co, users can see full URL as well and know where the link is taking them. This will greatly help users not clicking any hidden malware links. Here is the Twitter’s example where how a really long URL like http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 gets wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for a SMS display while on Twitter.com or its apps it might display amazon.com/Delivering- or the page title or the whole URL itself.
The second change will be the links routed with t.co service will be part of Twitter’s new Promoted Tweets advertising service that determines relevant tweet ads apart from providing analytics on the t.co data to companies using Twitter’s commercial accounts service.
The third major change reported on Mashable and posted on Google Twitter Development Talk Group which says the way the Twitter API counts characters is going to change slightly. Though the t.co links will of 20 characters after link wrapping, the actual displayed link text can be over 140 characters. Here is the post from Google Twitter Development Talk Group
“the way the Twitter API counts characters is going to change ever so slightly. our 140 characters is now going to be defined as 140 characters after link wrapping. t.co links are of a predictable length — they will always be 20 characters. after we make this live, it will be feasible to send in the text for a status that is greater than 140 characters. the rule is after the link wrapping, the text transforms to 140 characters or fewer. we’ll be using the same logic that is in twitter-text-rb to figure out what is a URL. ”
The launch of Twitter’s t.co URL shortener will be a sad news for all those several URL shorteners having millions of users like Bit.ly, ow.ly and many more who relied heavily on Twitter. According to VentureBeat, Twitter has confirmed that even after Twitter’s t.co service is fully rolled out in summer, third party URL shorteners and analytics will also work but will use their own features and not that of t.co features.
