Better that than the nasty cannibalising shorteners which are prevalent at the moment!

If you can track it - then great, you don't need to use bit.ly for URL's on twitter - will the shortener work anywhere? i.e. non twitter websites? If not just adds a bit of work to posting links surely?

This concern makes the SEO community look rather pathetic. We're so obsessed with links we're thinking in terms of PageRank and 301-redirect chains.

Has no one given any thought to the user experience?

users?

We're worrying about 301 redirects through nofollows here? Really? Last time I checked, 80% of 0 was still 0.

Barry, it just seems to me that the discussion (not your report) in the community tends to overlook the fact that people are using Twitter as a means of gathering information. I get more traffic than link value from Twitter, in my opinion.

AJ -- many of the Tweets are picked up by other services that drop the nofollows.

Michael, great point in both respects. How prevalent are the services that rebroadcast tweets? Is this an issue worth spending time on?

It sounds like Twitter is trying to solve a problem that has been adequately solved already and doesn't need to be solved again, and they're FORCING everyone to use their solution. I don't like being forced!

I sure hope this doesn't mess up bit.ly tracking.

How can twitter force us?

I just don't get what people's problems are with this. For the beginning user, having to use a 3rd party shortener is a hassle and this is really something that should have been implemented long ago.

As for chained redirects, the simple solution is to just NOT USE the first URL shortener any more. It's hardly rocket science people.

I think it's easier just stop using bit.ly or anything else. If twitter will have a built-in shortener, great! This will really save a lot of time to me!

Twitter is not blindly forcing you to use their URL shortener - they're doing this for a reason. Specifically, to protect readers who unknowingly click on malicious links and also for them to track metrics for Promoted Tweets.

Two points about this:

1. As AJ has pointed out, Twitter links are nofollow anyway.
2. As Matt Cutts said in his interview with Rand Fishkin on SEOmoz last friday, Google has no trouble handling chains of 2-3 301 redirects.

So it's a non-issue on both sides of the issue! :)

I don't see this as a issue to be concerned about, since the links are no-follow. I'll go about business in the same manner as I always do. I use Twitter to get a small stream of traffic to my SEO blog. I haven't seen much use for it, other than that so far for me.

I think Spunky Jones above has a good point - being no follow, the links are of limited value for "link juice" anyway, so this may be a storm in a teacup. That said however, if you are going use use a URL shortener, nothing is forcing you to use to - if you use the new twitter one why would you also encode it with bit.ly? It just doesn't make sense!
Matt