There are many url shortener services on the web, twitter even has its own built in function.

One of the problems here is, we don’t actually know where we are going. So it fits in the tweet, but leads straight along to FAIL.

Twitter have now decided they are going to take some steps, to reduce the risks associated with the url shortening. Their new service that will run behind the scenes will be checking and verifying these links, and intercepting and disabling the bad ones on the twitter service before we board the fail bus.

This is good news, and I am sure will be welcomed by many. I also recommend using the Firefox plugging Long URL Please, to see what’s going on.