Twitter is adding its own URL shortener with metrics

by Jennifer Whitehead, posted on 9 June, 2010 at 9:04 am, filed under Analytics, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

http://t.co - the native Twitter URL shortener

Twitter has had its fair share of problems with spammers and phishing, especially through its direct messaging feature, but in March it started using its own URL shortening service in DMs, partly as a way of blocking suspicious links.

Now it is rolling out the service for the main Twitter site. This might not be exciting news if you’ve a gift for writing short tweets or you run Twitter through one of the clients, such as Tweetdeck, which automatically shorten links, but any link shortening for tweets sent from the Twitter website to be done manually.

But read on, because Twitter is offering URL shortening with a difference. Firstly, it, it’s shorter than the current ones available – each link begins with http://t.co.

And the Twitter blog reveals another interesting fact about it. It says: “A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.”

So no more clicking on anonymous bit.ly links taking you to a Daily Mail article that three people you follow have already linked to.

And it should have good implications for marketing as well — Twitter has revealed that the URL shortener will contribute to the metrics behind the Promoted Tweets platform as well as being used to determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. Twitter is looking at how this data can be used by the commercial account service when it launches.

Developers are now being invited to check out the service so they can prepare Twitter devices for the change. At the moment, the Twitter blog says that the service is only being tested with a few Twitter employee accounts. For the rest of us, we’ll have to wait until summer to see the improvements.