For a long time there been a major security flaw with following links from Twitter. When a link is shortened via a service like cli.gs, bit.ly or tinyurl the user has no idea of where they will be directed upon clicking. The best way to manage this so far has basically been to click on shortened links only from users that you know or trust. That’s the danger of clicking on a shortened URL from Twitter Search or trending topics - you may end up clicking on a link to a site with malware or other issues that you would rather not encounter.
Other third party Twitter clients began expanding Tweets for their users a while ago, and this will be nothing new for those users, but Twitter itself had not provided this service for users who mostly login to the Web site to do their tweeting.
Recently I began to see that Twitter provided small text next to shortened links that says “(expand)”. If you click on that link, then Twitter expands the short URL to the destination URL for you so that you can see exactly where you will be going, and more importantly, decide whether or not that’s a domain you would like to visit.
See the images below for an example:
This is a great development, although for the time being I am only seeing it on Twitter searches, and not in my home Twitter feed. Hopefully it will expand into those feeds as well and allow us all to follow links more freely and securely.
As a side note, the “Digg Bar” is under scrutiny for redirecting people to the Digg page for a URL rather than the destination URL, but in some senses that is a safer method because you get a little bit more information about the destination page before you land on it. I understand the controversy, but there is a valid rationale for why some people would prefer that, even if they’re not heavy Digg users.
Last 5 posts by BradCohen
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- Twitter Messaging - May 21st, 2009
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Tags: Add new tag, linking, Social Media, Vanity URLs
