Tinyurl

Thanks to Twitter and its 140-character tweet limit, the number of URL-shortening services like bit.ly and TinyURL have exploded over the past couple of years. They’re useful for shortening unwieldy URLs, but as the destination the link points to isn’t immediately obvious, they can also be used for malicious purposes — to trick users into visiting a site they wouldn’t have otherwise, for example. Untiny can be used to decipher those shortened links and see where they end up.

Having to go the Untiny site for every link would be a pain, though, so thankfully there are a large number of third-party Untiny add-ons and extensions listed for various browsers and IM clients on this page, including extensions for Firefox and Opera, Greasemonkey userscripts and more. These can automatically reveal the real destinations of any shortened links on a page — the screenshot above is of Om’s Twitterstream with all of the shortened links automatically decoded by the UnityFox Firefox add-on, for example — and provide a useful (and free) extra layer of security to the web.

Are you suspicious of shortened URLs?

(via gHacks)

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

Facebook's F8 developer conference starts in just a few hours time and, even if I had a plane ticket, I couldn't be there. The same went for Twitter's Chirp conference last week and the iPhone OS 4.0 release the week before that. It just wasn't in the stars and, more importantly, the budget - but that's what technology is for, right?

On that point, we'd like to look at a few ways you can keep up with the news coming out of today's F8 conference and other events you might not be able to attend in person but want to watch, in real-time, nonetheless. And for your convenience, we've embedded streaming video of the F8 Keynote after the jump.

Sponsor

First, for more less secretive events like today's F8 conference, there's the fully authorized, sponsored live-streaming video. And often a search on sites like UStream and Justin.tv get a number of somewhat shaky but nonetheless informative smartphone videos of the events. Often, these sites are the place to go for streaming video of less open events, like most any of Apple's clamped-down product releases. Then there's the old faithful hashtag, the identifier that shows you tweets that are (supposedly) related to the same topic, though sometimes fall short on that point. And lets not forget any number of live blogs.

But beyond all of these standard tools, we were reminded of an aggregator of all these different ways of remotely monitoring a real-time event that's been around for a bit more than a year now and is just as useful as ever - Almost.at.

Almost.at is a sweet looking tool written in Cappuccino by David Cann for the express purpose of "Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time". The service can be used on the web or in a standalone browser for Mac OSX 10.5+ and gathers all the content it can about a specific event from a number of services: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, TwitPic, TinyURL and Bit.ly. Streaming in real-time, Almost.at shows a number of different events in the left-most column, pulls in related tweets in the next, pictures and videos after that, and then related articles and external links in the final column. Even better, the web app offers a minute by minute timeline at the bottom of the screen, showing when the conversation was most active and allowing you to browse everything by the timeline.

So, while we'll certainly be keeping an eye on our own cultivated lists of who's who on Twitter, Almost.at will likely be the main browser tab we keep open alongside the live-streaming broadcast that we've embedded at the end of this post.

But before you get to watching today's F8 conference, you may want to catch up on what we're expecting, so here are a few links to that end:

• Om Malik's F8 Preview explains "How Facebook Plans to Take Over The Web".
• Marshall Kirkpatrick anticipates that a Facebook Firehose May Be Released at Developer Conference F8.
• Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon also gives a round-up of all the rumors leading up to the F8 conference that helps put everything in context.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick also expects that Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites.

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Twitter has announced it will start its own URL shortening service for tweets from its official apps.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams made the announcement Wednesday night at Chirp, the Twitter developer’s conference. It happened casually, during a Q&A session with attendees.

Williams sees the lack of an official Twitter link shortening service as “a problem” that needs to be solved.

When Twitter turns on its URL shortener, it will be the default shortener for the Twitter website, and the official Twitter apps on BlackBerry, the iPhone and Android — yes, there is an Android app in the works, Williams confirmed. The BlackBerry app is finished, and the iPhone app will be released as soon as Twitter completes the acquisition of AteBits it began last week. AteBits makes the super-popular Tweetie for the iPhone, which will be rebranded as Twitter for iPhone.

Twitter must have been planning this for a while, because it purchased Twee.tt (that’s a URL from Trinidad and Tobago) a few days ago, and that will probably become Twitter’s short URL root.

Right now, the Twitter website uses bit.ly to serve short links, and the most popular client apps give people a choice between bit.ly and other sites like tinyURL or J.mp. But bit.ly is the most popular, mostly because it’s the default link shortener for Twitter.

Williams said that the official client apps that are on their way will probably not give people a choice between different shorteners. “If they want to use a different shortener, they can just use a different app.”

The official apps will also serve Promoted Tweets from Twitter’s ad platform.

Bit.ly will likely survive — people are loyal to it now because it offers real-time stats for traffic and retweets on your shortened links. Bit.ly also has a paid service and a platform for creating your own URL shorteners.

See also:

• Google Jumps on the URL-Shortening Bandwagon With Goo.gl
• Twitter Will Start Selling Ads
• Bit.ly Pro Makes it Dead Simple to Create Your Own URL Shortener

Twitter has just announced at its Chirp developer conference that it will be launching its own URL shortener.

The company feels forcing using to leave twitter.com to shorten a link is absurd and therefore it sees a link shortener as an integrated part of the service the best option.

There’s no word on what URL shortener it might decide to use, but giving users an option is not something they are considering.

An acquisition or partnership with URL shortening service bit.ly would make sense. Along with being twitter’s most used url shortener (3.4 billion shortened links in March), bit.ly has a number of high profile influential investors including the likes of Chris Sacca, an early twitter investor. I simply can’t see twitter deciding bit.ly’s work becoming a trusted URL should just be dissipate – the shortener that has become almost synonymous with the service.

That said, twitter might very well resort to using its in-house short url twt.tl without partnering with bit.ly. It currently puts twt.lyy to use in direct messages to assure users that any included URL’s are safe to visit. If that were to be the case, bit.ly should still have a future with its recently launched (in beta) bitly.pro service that gives the enterprise its own custom short urls and an analytics dashboard. The pro service already has over 6000 customers and its most recent signup is Amazon.com.

So where does that leave is.gd, tinyurl and the literally hundreds of URL shorteners out there? Realistically…dead.

Original title and link for this post: Twitter to launch its own URL shortener