The General Services Administration is developing an official government service that shortens Web addresses for users of social networking tools who are restricted by brief messaging formats.
The increasing popularity of the microblogging site Twitter, with its 140 character limit on messages, has made commercial link-shortening services like bit.ly and tr.im important cogs in the social media community. Link-shortening applications take existing Web addresses and shrink them to fit into short messages that can be read via Twitter or on a smart phone. Since traditional URLs often can be extremely long, link-shorteners create short Web addresses that point at the same piece of content.
Go.USA.gov will serve as a trusted government counterpart to those services; only employees with official government e-mail accounts can use the service and only links from official government domains can be shortened.
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