Twitter Announces Bit.ly Killer
Twitter just announced a new URL shortener, t.co, in a post on its official blog, as well as a new system for displaying links inside tweets.
The new service, currently being tested internally, will be available for all users later this summer.
Twitter will "wrap" all links automatically, whether you are tweeting from the company's website, or using a third-party client. This will allow Twitter to offer its own link analytics, as third-party shorteners like Bit.ly currently do.
But the big change for users will be how links are displayed. Twitter will only display t.co URLs in SMS feeds. For the purposes of Twitter's 140 character limit, Twitter will look at the shortened t.co URL. But users viewing Twitter from a computer will see an excerpt of the link, or perhaps the entire link in its unshortened form.
This, Twitter says, "removes the obscurity" from shortened links, meaning, basically, that it lets people know what they're clicking on -- unless the link in question has already been shortened to something opaque.
The move was expected, but it's still bad news for third-party shorteners. "White-label" shorteners like the ones provided by Bit.ly (that is, customized short URLs for large corporate clients) could still be useful if Twitter can't offer better analytics. But there will now be a major incentive for users and clients to drop generic shorteners.
See also: All the developers who just got screwed by Twitter
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