Twitter just started its own link-shortening service. Nancy Scola, in an article on The American Prospect explains how such subtle changes could be of great import to the future of the internet. We should pay attention, even to seemingly small changes in internet use…

Excerpt:

“Short-linking—that act of repackaging ungainly, often ugly strings of letters, numbers, ampersands, and question marks into elegantly tiny URLs—has been around for more than a decade, but only gained mainstream traction with the 2006 launch of Twitter and its capping of tweet-length at 140 characters. While the mechanics are complicated, the short story about the recent techie flare-up over short-linking is that Twitter has moved away from third-party shorteners to its own, the use of which is now mandatory for all links shared directly on the service.

It’s been a small shift, little noticed by most, but now that trading links on social media—Hey, check out this video of Hillary yelling at Republicans!—is a main feature of the Internet-connected world, short-links are part of the real fabric of the web. Deep in some software-developer circles, not all are pleased with Twitter’s “link wrapping.”

Twitter has many reasons to want to act as the middleman on short-linking. More than ever, digital data is currency. Knowing who clicks what can be used to power everything from statistics add-ons for premium accounts to targeted advertising and advanced market research.”

The original: Pasting the Web