New York — In an effort to fight off mallware and provide analytics data and generate more information about shared links, Twitter Wednesday unveiled details about a feature that wraps and shortens user-posted links. One objective is to remove the obscurity often associated with long URL strings and clearly show where the address will lead a user.
Now Twitter is gearing up to roll out automatic link shortening to all tweets. The site will commence by testing it amongst Twitter employee accounts, extending it to all users later this summer, using the new t.co URL.
The t.co service, expected to be released this summer, will automatically shorten and scrutinize links posted to Twitter, according to a company blog post by Sean Garrett, vice president of communications at Twitter.
“Since early March, we have been forwarding links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers,” Twitter’s Garrett wrote in a blog-post announcement.
“Moreover, to a better user experience and increased safety, forwarding links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm — the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users,” he wrote. “We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.”
Initially, Twitter is rolling out wrapped links to a small number of accounts such as @TwitterAPI, @rsarver, and @raffi to help developers test their code. Ultimately, however, all links on Twitter will be wrapped, said Garrett.
Twitter has been functioning on this capability for several months. On March 9, the company began using twt.tl to protect direct messages and email notifications from phishing scams. And in April, during a Q&A session at Chirp, Twitter CEO Evan Williams confirmed the company would offer a link-abbreviator.
The inclusion of this URL shortening feature will not affect users’ ability to use other similar services for their Twitter posts.