Updated on Sat, 2012-08-25 12:23
Tens of millions of links are tweeted on Twitter each day. Wrapping these shared links helps Twitter protect users from malicious content while offering useful insights on engagement. All links submitted within tweets and direct messages, regardless of length, will eventually be wrapped with t.co.
Current state of t.co
As of October 10, 2011 the t.co URL wrapper automatically wraps all links submitted to Twitter, regardless of length. This includes so-called URLs without protocols.
Upcoming improvements
- (done) t.co URLs to become up to 20 characters long —
- (done) All URLs regardless of length (including URLs without protocol automatically linked by twitter-text) will be wrapped by t.co
- (done) URL Entities returned in the Search API
- (done) SSL-based URLs wrapped with t.co to be HTTPS t.co links
- (coming) Entities returned by default on all other REST API methods — May 2012
Need help parsing tweet text?
Take a look on the Twitter text processing library we’re using for auto linking and extraction of usernames, lists & hashtags.