Twitter has once again gone into battle with third party service providers, last week they announced a new photo sharing application which rivals Twitpic and other providers. Today they have launched their own URL shortening service, which unlike other providers is built directly into Twitter.
This means users can paste url’s into their Tweets and have them automatically shortened on the fly, this will be extremely useful to the end user but will provide little solace to current URL shortening services.
The official Twitter blog explains how it works, “Just paste a link of any length into the Tweet box on Twitter.com. 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”.
The blog post also explains how their new link sharing system increases security by warning users if a link is pointing towards an unscrupulous site, such as a site with malware or a known phishing site. Presumably Twitter has tied this system into another security site that monitors such things.
The overall message from Twitter is that they want simplicity for Twitter users, they say sharing links is now ‘simple and instant’. At this stage their is no analytics built into the native Twitter link sharing service, their advice to users who want this feature is to use a third party service – there seems to be plenty of life in bit.ly yet.
We tried it out and got the following message, possibly an isolated issue:
Will you find this service useful, what other things should Twitter add to make their site simpler to the end user?