After waking this morning and going through the nights' tweets, I stumbled across a few rumours that Twitter had ousted long-time URL shortener Bit.ly from automatically shortening links when posted from the homepage.

This could be a bug or glitch, but it could also be one of two very interesting plays by the company.
Firstly, the could be doing it to be service agnostic - the company relies heavily on the third-party application market (even after bragging about forthcoming features that might increase the homepage's appeal) and might be trying to position itself by perhaps allowing users to choose their own URL shortener on the site.

Secondly, they might be thinking of launching a shortener of their own. Their reliance on third-party applications we talked about a minute ago is also one of the things most commentators are concerned about, and the company could be making waves to bring things into the fold internally.

However this shakes out, at present you wont have your URLs shortened via Bit.ly automatically from the Twitter homepage at present.