Buzz

The initiative Twitter began back in June to make t.co the default URL shortener for all its users will be completed by the end of this year, said the company in an email it sent out to its entire user base on Wednesday night. The service hopes through this move to improve its security, which has suffered due to the sharing of links pointing to fraudulent sites or malware. But the move is also bad news for competing URL shorteners from third-party developers.

“In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link,” the company said.

The way in which a link is displayed using t.co will depend on which device it’s being displayed. For instance, a long link like http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 may be “wrapped” as http://t.co/DRo0trj when it’s displayed on SMS. But when displayed on the web or on an application, a longer version may be displayed. The longer version will either be the entire original URL, the page title or the original domain and part of the URL, i.e. amazon.com/Delivering-.

The service says this is being done to increase the transparency of shortened links and where they will actually take you.

In addition: “When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant.”

Twitter’s official link wrapper will be expanding to more and more users over the coming weeks, and will be the default for all accounts by the end of the year. This sounds like a good move for security on the service, but a bad move for competing URL shorteners like Bit.ly, which was the default shortener used by Twitter in the past. This isn’t the first time Twitter has caused strain to its relationship with the developer community that helped build out the functionality of its service, and it probably won’t be the last.

Finally, Twitter logs each time you click on a t.co wrapped link, and it’s been reported that the company will use that data in its Promoted Tweets algorithm. That is, the links you click on Twitter will determine the types of ads that are displayed to you on the system.