Twitter joins the .CO party!

Twitter is now the latest company to join the .CO Founders Program with T.CO — its official URL shortener. This is great news for our friends at .CO and also good news for Twitter users, as Twitter has revealed its plans to use T.CO to protect users from harmful activity like malware and phishing attacks.

How it works

Basically any link that is sent in a Direct Message will be passed through Twitter’s link service and converted to a T.CO link in your SMS or email notification.

If the link is matched with a potentially dangerous site, you will get a warning when you click on it. Twitter says they are also testing this link for their tweets and that ultimately every link on Twitter will be wrapped.

What does this mean for other URL shorteners?

If you are bit.ly fans like us, you can still use it or your URL shortening service of choice. Tracking will also continue to work on those links. Twitter notes that the “link service at http://t.co is only used on links posted on Twitter and is not available as a general shortening service.”

So really Twitter users won’t notice much of a difference, other than a few more T.CO links flying around. But kudos to the awesome team at .CO for striking this deal, with new extensions the more exposure the better and they’ve been doing a great job so far!

Join the .CO party!

You can pre-order your very own .CO domain with Name.com for $28 general availability and $278 landrush. The landrush starts June 21 and the public launch is July 20, so you still have some time to try and secure your name before the launch.