Twitter users learned on Thursday that the site will begin wrapping all links posted through the service with its own t.co domain. Twitter had been discussing this proposal on its blog, so the announcement is not surprising. Now that it is official, though, it is safe to start speculating on what it means to various users.
For third-party developers, of course, the move is just more bad news from Twitter, which is stepping up its competition on many fronts. For marketers, the new service is surely going to result in link tracking analytics services provided directly from Twitter. How well this will compete from those services offered by third-party providers is an open question. Twitter’s statement on that is vague: "we hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time."
What Twitter is doing is expanding the roll-out of its link wrapping service t.co to wraps links in Tweets with a simplified link in which the actual domain and part of the URL shows. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/ Delivering-Happiness-Profits- Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 , it said, 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.
A user clicking on a wrapped link will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware. Then it will forward the user on to the destination URL. By the end of the year, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.
Already There
Link tracking, analytics and shorteners already offer decent data - better, many will say, than the current default Twitter URL shortener. The question will be whether Twitter drives these services out of business leaving marketers with less what they started. For example, bit.ly or ow.ly include built in tracking codes that can monitor clicks, and who is Twittering about the URL in the link, writes Rich Page at his website optimization blog. "And they show up in your analytics as their own referrer (instead of as direct traffic), no matter whether the clicker uses a Twitter application, or Twitter.com, so you can measure your Twitter usage better."
The default Twitter URL shortener doesn't do that, he says.
Another example is Dailymotion, a Web video site, that recently launched its bit.ly-powered URL shortener, dai.ly. The dai.ly short domain lets advertisers create recognizable short URLs with brand names and keywords - as an example it points to the City of Scars short films web site URL, which was shortened to http://dai.ly/cityofscars. There are other services that offer custom shorteners, such as Bit.ly's service introduced last year, "Bit.ly Pro," which allows publishers and bloggers to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites.
Safety First
Twitter - and service such as Bit.ly for that matter - suggest that one of the benefits of using their shortener is online safey. It is an argument that resonates, given the level of spam that has targeted Twitter. It may be that the security fears about shorteners are overblown though - assuming the user has a security application in place, says Michael Sutton, VP of security research at Zscaler. (via TechNewsWorld).
"Shorteners all work the same way," he said. "Essentially, they map between an abbreviated URL to the real URL." Basically user makes a request to the URL-shortening service, which looks up the shortened URL to see which URL it points to, and then sends a redirect message to the user's browser. "That process is important to understand, because the user is still making a regular request just as if he or she had typed it into the URL bar," Sutton says. "That is why I say there is a lot of hype circulating around URL shorteners. Yes, they can be used to obviate the final URL. But if there is a security application that is inspecting the traffic - including that final request sent - then it shouldn't be a problem."
Remember Tr.im?
Not overblown are the fears that Twitter could put out of business some of these services. Last year Nambu shut down Tr.im because it couldn't find make the service pay, it said in a corporate blog post announcing its demise. It also couldn’t find a buyer, it said, not even Twitter. "No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name," it wrote in its last post.
