Early June, Twitter had announced that it will have it’s own URL shortener. It further says:

“If you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn’t a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we’re taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We’re testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.”

How the Link Service Works

All links included in Direct Message notification emails will pass through link service and are converted to a http://t.co link. Twitter’s link service at http://t.co is used to better protect users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity. A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue.

It will look like this:

Interesting thing to note is, Twitter is going to use the stats, available via this link service, to build it’s own analytics system.