By: Aseem Gaurav on June 8, 2011
Popular microblogging site Twitter has just announced its own link shortening service that enables users to paste long URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) directly into messages sent through its website.
“Users can paste a link of any length into the message composition box on the site,” the company said in its blog post.
"After you've composed your Tweet and you hit the "Tweet" button, we'll shorten the link so that it only takes up 19 characters," it said.
Thus a user now doesn’t need an external URL shortener like bit.ly when you want to shorten a link.
To shorten the link, your message will be assigned a t.co link ID. And the way Twitter shrinks the link allows you to see the site that the link points to.
Twitter has also made an effort to make link sharing more reliable. Thus, clicking on a link that is reported to be malicious, Twitter will give you a warning page, before taking you to the linked page.
Twitter also added language support for Brazilian Portuguese to its site. Twitter already supports nine languages, including French, German, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and English
Experts say the service could also shorten the Twitter’s relationship with the community of developers that build applications and services focused on Twitter’s platform.
