Twitter, as a part of its usual drill of upgrading links to a more secured domain, will be completing the migration of all “t.co” links to a more secured, HTTPS protocol. As a result, the URLs would now be increased in length by “1 character”, said developer advocate Niall Kennedy on Twitter Forums.
As a result of this, Niall also cautioned, that apps calculating available remaining characters in a Tweet should use Twitter’s help/configuration API endpoint5 to update URL lengths; theshort_url_length property will be updated to equal the value of short_url_length_https as all short URLs are now https.
Niall also mentioned, that sites with non-HTTPS domain names may see as much as 10% drop in their referral traffic metrics, though there would be a decrease in those percentage points “as users update their browsers to the latest versions supporting referrer policy.”
So how does it affect you, as a user ?
Honestly, not much. Moving to a more secured environment is obviously a good thing after all. Do be aware though, of the fact that while posting links, you’ll be one character short than your usual length. And sometimes, single character make a lot of difference, specially when you wish to fit in just the perfect tweet, and are left frustrated due to that character limit.
This however, isn’t the first time Twitter is bringing about changes in its short domain service “t.co”. In 2012, the company extended the maximum length of links from 20 to 22 characters for non-HTTPS URLs and from 21 to 23 characters for HTTPS URLs. Post this change though, all links would be 23 characters in length.
