Following the sale of o.co to Overstock for a tidy sum of $350,000 Twitter have acquired the use of t.co to play host to their brand new built in URL shortening service.

It was announced back in March that Twitter intended to build a native URL shortener into Twitter instead of users having to open a new window or tab and use 3rd party services such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com to shrink their links. It may seem like a relatively small enhancement, but Twitter have big plans for their new service.

Twitter plan to use the service to better protect users from malicious sites that spread malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful content. A link converted by the t.co service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites blacklisted by the community, and if a match is found users are warned before they continue navigation. Eventually they hope to use the service to provide detailed analysis of links, and better identify what people deem relevant or interesting.

This essentially means that Twitter will check all links in tweets before the post goes live to anyone’s feed. They’re even going a step further, allowing the ability for links to look different depending on what you’re using to read and access twitter feeds. Wherever possible they will remove the obscurity of shortened links altogether and show the Page Title, or simply the full URL rather than simply a nonsense shortened link to improve the transparency of links in Twitter posts.

Currently Twitter has rolled out the t.co functionality to a handful of their staff accounts and within all Direct Messages. This is expected to grow continuously as they test the functionality and gradually roll it out globally across the service.

Following the acquisition of their super short and snappy domain name Twitter mention a “Special Thanks” to the team over at the CO Registry for helping them grab the premium t.co domain after the domain launch back in June this year.

“We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS, the registry for the new .CO extension, for helping us secure t.co for use with this service. Links shared on Twitter will be safer, clearer, and more valuable.”

Co Internet continue to experience impressive registration growth almost 3 months after launch, and having such a high profile company using a .co domain is sure to boost sales further. The counter on the Co Internet site has already reached over 497,000 domains registered, and there is hot debate over when the 500,000th domain registration will take place!

At the recent TRAFFIC event in Vancouver e.co was auctioned off for an impressive $81,000 to add to the portfolio of a high profile domain name investor, proving that the .Co extension has backing from multi-million dollar businesses and private investors alike.

Since being the number one performer at launch, Domainmonster have continued to register an outstanding number of .co domains. The demand for the domains has been so great we've even introduced a special offer for new registrations, slashing the cost of grabbing yourself an original domain post launch!

To read more about CO Domains and our special offer, go to: http://www.domainmonster.com/domain-name/co/