Will Twitter’s Link Shortener T.Co Kill Third Party Shorteners?
By Anna Johnson on June 14th, 2010Last week Twitter announced it was introducing its own Twitter link shortener, T.Co. Currently being tested by Twitter employees, Twitter says T.Co will increase user safety by providing a means of pre-qualifying links included in tweets.
With plans to roll out the initiative over the next few months, Twitter says all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party Twitter clients will be wrapped in – and displayed as – a t.co URL that indication of the destination of the link. Unlike most existing shorteners, t.co links will include words or letters that correspond to the original link.
For example, one or more of the words in the original link – or the first letters of each word in the link – may be appended to the t.co URL. For example, a link such as [LINK] may end up as http://t.co/wtlstktps
(I’m not sure that such a link will provide much indication of where the link will take someone but that’s the theory anyway…)
Not only does Twitter intend its t.co shortener to increase user safety, but it also plans to track link usage with a view to providing metrics for its Promoted Tweets advertising platform and a planned commercial accounts service.
Announcing the t.co shortener, Twitter ‘communications guy’ Sean Garrett said:
“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. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.”
So will t.co kill third party shorteners?
Twitter says links that are already shortened by third party shorteners will be converted into t.co links just like any other links. So if you currently use a third party shortener you may continue doing so and be able to track clicks and other such metrics provided by the URL shortening service.
The problem may be, however, that a shortened link that is further shortened into a t.co link may end up looking much more obscure than an original link that is shortened into a t.co URL. If Twitter users come to trust t.co links that give some indication of their destination, whilst distrusting t.co links that look as obscure as ever, they may tend away from clicking those more obscure looking links.
But perhaps the greatest potential blow to third party shortening services is the potential for Twitter to provide free statistics for t.co usage. If, for example, I can track how many clicks I get from a t.co link… why would I need to track this twice by using another shortened link? Especially, if the end result is a less inviting link…
Source: Sean Garrett, “Links and Twitter: Length Shouldn’t Matter,” Twitter Blog, June 8, 2010
