So this is Twitter's Digg bar: they want to wrap and trace every link that goes in a Tweet? So much for all those custom bit.ly domains. So much for bit.ly.
These guys are going crass quick. @alex's decision to quit is less and less surprising.
And this is great news, as far as I'm concerned. Generic shortened URLs are becoming a plague upon the web and are marginally useful at best outside of Twitter. Even more props to Twitter for demystifying links where applicable instead of taking the easier route of pure obscurity. The sooner third-party shorteners disappear from Twitter the sooner they can disappear from the rest of the web and we can have link transparency back again.
On a related note, I'm actually quite happy that Twitter is starting to close up their platform. People can stop pretending it's some open platform for global communication and finally realize it's a novel service thanks to its popularity, but little more.
Marginally useful at best outside of Twitter? Care to explain? Less than 1% of bitly's traffic is coming from twtitter, so obviously there are other people that find value in trackable URLs... I'm curious why you think it isn't useful?
Link rot, link hijack, it takes longer to reach the page, additional point of failure and domain based algorithms break. In other words, plague.
But being able to pop in a nice terse URL where a long one would break in some E-mail client is handy.
All they are doing is wrapping the URL, not actually changing anything. All services that have their own URL's will be 100% fine.
Their API will return the original links too with markers, so client code can be updated to display the original URLs. Twitter wants developers to display the original URLs and link to the t.co URLs.
Their rational behind this is flawed. One of the reason they are giving for implementing this is to be able to shut down links if they turn out to be malicious, possibly as a bait and switch. But since the right way to do a shortener is to do a 301 and that's what they say they are doing, they wouldn't have that ability.
So, not a Digg-bar. Its what many users want-they put a long ugly link in, and then it gets shorter.
Not the end of bit.ly. Why? Publishers want these numbers, not to give them to twitter.