Twitter – URL in Twitter Profile

twitter

When creating a Twitter profile I noticed that all URLs I entered in the profile where changed from:

http://www.abzurb.com to abzurb.com and it uses a t.co link to link to the page.

https://twitter.com/abzurb

On most other Twitter profiles it just displays the full URL: http://www.blabla.com

Is there any way to change this?

Best Answer

Twitter wraps all URLs, in part of their content - bio, profile, tweets using their in-house URL shortener, primarily for their analytics & for security against malicious URLs.

Now on twitter's webpage as well on their API, twitter provides both the short URL, the the display URL as well as the actual URL

Here's an example from my twitter profile

 "id": 11594372,
  "id_str": "11594372",
  "name": "Sathya",
  "screen_name": "SathyaBhat",
  "location": "Bangalore, India",
  "description": "Super User & Web Apps Stack Exchange ♦, PLSQL Dev, Mangalorean, Rum, Beer, @Preshit certified lazyass, LOLG Nexus 4, Gaming http://t.co/fZDbzJdc",
  "url": "http://sathyabh.at",
  "entities":  {
    "url":  {
      "urls":  [
         {
          "url": "http://sathyabh.at",
          "expanded_url": null,
          "indices":  [
            0,
            18
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    "description":  {
      "urls":  [
         {
          "url": "http://t.co/fZDbzJdc",
          "expanded_url": "http://sbhat.me",
          "display_url": "sbhat.me",
          "indices":  [
            124,
            144
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  },

You can see that display_url is what twitter shows on their websites. Many twitter clients do not handle these well; some show expanded_url, others display_url while some more just show the shortened t.co URL.

While this is the explanation for why it looks different, there's no way to change this - that's how twitter does things.

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