Less than 140 characters: Twitter to increase length of t.co urls

There’s some bad news for those of you who like sharing links on Twitter and want to tweet about it. In a developer blog post today, Twitter announced that it was increasing the length of their t.co link wrapper. The t.co is the default link shortener that appears when you tweet out a link. The post states:

We’d like to share some upcoming changes to our t.co link wrapper with the ecosystem. We’re going to be extending the maximum length of t.co wrapped links from 20 to 22 characters for non-https URLs, and 21 to 23 characters for https URLs.

[caption id=“attachment_549397” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Twitter logo is seen in this file photo. AFP[/caption]

To give everyone enough time to update their applications, this change won’t go into effect for two months - so please consider this a heads up.

The change takes place on 6 February and by 20 February 2013, Twitter begins generating and returning t.co URLs with this new maximum length. So how does this affect you? Well if you do share a lot of links using Twitter’s t.co, the length of the short-link will increase which means your tweet will have less remaining characters. However if you are using bit.ly or TinyUrl, you don’t have to worry about t.co.