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Twitter introduces its own URL shortener

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Twitter, which created a sensation in blogging with the concept of 140-character tweets, said that it is testing a new service, a URL shortener of its own. The new service is aimed at increasing the security of the site and provide a better user experience.

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“Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL,” said Twitter spokesperson Sean Garrett in a blog post on Tuesday.

“Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets,” he said.

Though Twitter has a provision of URL shortening, which is a third party service, there were reports that the service could be used to spread malware. When the new service is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

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“Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn't a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com,” the blog post added.

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing 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,” said Garrett.

According to Twitter, the new service would give a new user experience, safety, and value.

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“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.”

With this service Twitter hopes that it would be able to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link.

Reaching two-billion mark

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This apart Twitter has also reached yet another milestone, as the number of tweets sent every month has almost touched two billion. According to the company's chief operating officer Dick Costolo, around 65 million tweets are sent on Twitter each day.

With this Twitter reached 15 billion tweets at the end of last month, three months after it broke the 10 billion count, according to The Daily Telegraph. Reported.

According to Pingdom, a Web site monitoring service, Twitter hit 1 billion tweets per month for the first time and now it has almost doubled in just a few months.

Costolo said the service sees around 135,000 new registrations each day, though it is not clear how many of those are individuals rather than businesses.

Do you think, the new URL shortening service will help Twitter to curtail the spread of malware and increase the security of the site? Please feel free to leave your comments and observations about it in the box below.

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