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Twitter has begun automatically shortening URLs pasted into tweets by its users, the microblogging site announced today.

When users compose a tweet and paste a link of any length into the Tweet box, Twitter will automatically abbreviate the link to 19 characters when users hit send. In testing for almost exactly a year, the service--called t.co--is being rolled out incrementally and will wrap and abbreviate all links shared on the site in the same way other URL-shortening services, such as Bitly, do.

Twitter said user security played a major role in implementing the new service.

"Since we show … Read more

Bitly has raised $14 million in a few years, and shrinks more than 8 billion Web addresses a month. And it's done all that without anyone running the company full time.

Until now. Technology vet Peter Stern, whose last start-up ended up being acquired by Facebook, is Bitly's first official CEO.

He's taking the reins from Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who helped hatch Bitly as one of his incubator's projects and has overseen it since, while juggling lots of other balls at the same time.

Stern founded Zenbe, an e-mail start-up that Facebook "acqhired" last fall, … Read more

Doug from Pennsylvania inadvertently started another 404 Podcast meme in yesterday's video voice mail with his sign-off salute, "Tagger easy!" We dedicate today's show title to him and WhiteWhine, a Tumblr for First World problems.

More than 200 protesters in Libya have been killed with Qaddafi's machine guns and large-caliber weapons, but some nerds in America are more concerned with the future of .ly domains like Bitly. How will we shorten our links to a Tweet-appropriate size if Libya shuts down the Internet again?!

Don't freak out yet, because Internet restrictions by the Libyan government will not affect those domains, since most of the servers that give access to .ly links are located outside of Libya, and most administrators like Bitly CEO John Borthwick are already using precautionary measures to ensure their stability.… Read more

Google took a somewhat arcane but important step yesterday in improving its goo.gl URL-shortening service, making it available not just through the Web but through third-party software.

Google announced the goo.gl application programming interface (API) yesterday. That makes it possible, for example, to let software such as TweetDeck shorten Web addresses to more easily fit within Twitter's 140-character constraints.

As with other services such as Bit.ly, the goo.gl service can share data about the expansion of the URLs. That's useful for companies that want to know how many people clicked a link in some … Read more

Goo.gl Lite is a free extension that adds Google's Goo.gl URL shortener to the Mozilla Firefox toolbar. When you click the Goo.gl Lite icon, the program automatically generates a shortened URL and copies it to the Clipboard.

Goo.gl Lite installs much like other Firefox add-ons, although once it's installed, we needed to open the Firefox toolbar manager and drag the Goo.gl Lite icon to our browser's toolbar. Clicking Tools/Add-ons let us enable, disable, and uninstall it via the Add-Ons manager. Though the program offered no options, none are needed, since it … Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Google announces the Chrome Web Store with apps for the Web and gives an in-depth look at the forthcoming Chrome Operating System

Google also shows off a new Android tablet running the newest version of Android called Gingerbread

The next version of Internet Explorer 9 will let you specify which Web sites are not allowed to track you

Sprint is considering selling off Nextel to save $11 billion

A new virus is spreading over Twitter through URL shorteners

Bejeweled 3 is out

A new virus is infecting Twitter users through the use of URLs shortened by the goo.gl service.

Apparently triggered last night, the virus is spreading as a result of users clicking on links that start with http://goo.gl, Google's URL shortener. TechCrunch is saying that the virus started on Twitter's mobile site and has been growing through different URLs, including http://goo.gl/od0az and http://goo.gl/R7f68.

The virus tries to redirect unsuspecting users to malicious Web sites, according to Techweet, which says that the messages are coming from new, disposable Twitter accounts as … Read more

MuldeR's MakeInstantPlayer is open-source freeware for converting video recordings into self-running executable files. By converting videos to program files, it makes it so they'll run when clicked, without requiring a media player. You can extract clips from movies and other sources and turn them into self-running videos that can be embedded, uploaded, and attached to lots of stuff.

MakeInstantPlayer's compact, efficient interface was easy to figure out: Click and browse to source and destination directories, select some options, and click Preview. The tool's player window opened and, after a moment, displayed our source video. Satisfied, we … Read more

The modern world has one immutable law: where the founders of Facebook go, so does the rest of society.

Recently, Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker, just two of the characters from "The Social Network," donated $170,000 to assist Proposition 19, a California idea aimed at legalizing pot.

And now I read in The New York Times that, sensing a turning of the tides, or merely a cloud of smoke about to emerge from an important chimney, many people are anticipating pot legalization by buying up pot-related domains.

The Times tells of Kevin Faler, who was once a … Read more