Here are a few new updates and news bits rolled out for the Twittersphere this week.
Automatic link shortening
The biggest news is that Twitter.com now supports automatic link shortening. Not all users have the feature yet, but they will soon.
Designed so that no action is required on the user’s part, Twitter’s new link shortener will automatically identify when a long link has been posted in a tweet, as in the demo tweet below. The service will then surface a message that reads, “Link will appear shortened,” and the remaining character count will update to reflect that. Once the user publishes the tweet, the link will appear as a shortened version of the original, though in reality it has been assigned a t.co link ID.
Leaving part of the original link intact means users won’t be blindly clicking links that could potentially lead to malicious websites. Businesses and individuals that care about click-through analytics can continue to use whatever third-party link shortening services they want.
Brazilian Portuguese
Twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com and Twitter for Android are all now available in Brazilian Portuguese, the tenth language to be supported on the microblogging site. Support for other mobile applications is coming soon.
A language addition wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy in of itself, but what’s fascinating is that Twitter says the language was only added to its translation center three days ago, making Portuguese the most quickly completed translation project yet. That’s significant because it means that Twitter has some incredibly loyal users, which could make further translation projects a breeze.
New PR
Lynn Fox, who has held several high-profile PR positions at Apple, Google, Palm, Lucasfilm and Ustream, will now serve as director of communications at Twitter under Sean Garret, according to AllThingsD.
