OMG Twitter Kills URL Shortening Companies. Those….

Twitter is to introduce its own automatic URL shortening service, a move that may kill off many of the URL shortening companies that currently provide these services to Twitter users.

Under the changes, Twitter will now automatically shorten links using the t.co domain, including links already shortened by third party URL shortening services.

In an interesting step Twitter describes as removing “the obscurity of shortened link and [letting users] know where a link will take you” the original URL, or if the URL is too long, a shortened version of it will appear in Twitter streams vs the t.co link.

The move makes sense for a number of reasons, the most notable is that URL shortening is not currently available for those users who use Twitter directly and not a third party client, a majority of Twitter users if previous surveys are to be believed. On the financial side, Twitter notes that

“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.”

Third party URL shortening services do have a place outside Twitter, but in a market space that has struggled to make money (and has seen a number of services already fail,) the loss of Twitter shortening, in full or even in part may deliver a final blow to many existing URL shortening services.

The announcement by Twitter follows the recent pattern of Twitter offering its own services that compete with third parties, and really should not come as a surprise. The term “mugs game” still applies to companies trying to make money from offering third party Twitter services.