Twitter have announced that they’ll be rolling out their own URL shortener this summer. So instead of the common bit.ly, you’re going to see your links wrapped with a t.co URL like http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMSes and maybe a descriptive anchortext like amazon.com/Delivering for web users.

This also means that there will be some changes to the rules of tweeting, the gist of which are listed below:
- you can now tweet more than 140 characters.
- the text part, i.e. excluding the link, is limited to 120 characters.
- Twitter will encode the link with t.co or a descriptive anchortext and shorten/lengthen it to 20 characters.

The links will be routed through Twitter’s “link service” to protect users who unknowingly click on malicious links - a thoughtful move, especially with the increase in phising scams these days.

In addition, it will be used to measure metrics for their new Resonance algorithm and applied to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising platform. So instead of a purely CPM model, relevance and quality will also be a factor for the ads in the coming future.

One of three revenue streams, Promoted Tweets is now live on Twitter’s search results, but will also likely show in user feeds in the future. Other expected revenue streams include charging Google, Yahoo and Bing data feed fees for displaying live search in their search results, and a new Professional feature that will support multi-user accounts, ad metrics, etc.

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