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How to skirt Twitter's restriction on links in DMs

Tired of being told you can't send a link via direct message on Twitter? Me too!

Jason Cipriani Contributing Writer, ZDNet

Jason Cipriani is based out of beautiful Colorado and has been covering mobile technology news and reviewing the latest gadgets for the last six years. His work can also be found on sister site CNET in the How To section, as well as across several more online publications.

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Jason Cipriani

Aug. 7, 2014 2:24 p.m. PT

The ability for Twitter users to direct-message one another links to outside sites has been disabled for quite some time now. What started off being labeled as a bug has slowly turned into a real headscratcher. Other than the impending update to Twitter's direct-messaging service as a whole, I can't think of any real reason to leave the feature disabled.

Alas, I often take to Twitter to complain about the inability to send links via direct message to friends and coworkers. Then today, after tweeting a short story about my utter disgust over the disabled feature, I was sent a reply that's changed my outlook for the entire week.

@MrCippy It's easy to bypass that with a URL shortener. I've never had an issue with goo.gl
-- Michael Bettiol (@bettiol) August 7, 2014

The clouds opened up, a light shined down upon my stockpile of links, and I rejoiced. Loudly.

Naturally I immediately tested the supposed workaround and found it to be valid.

So if you want to get around this super-lame restriction, copy the link you want to share, visit goo.gl, copy the shortened link, then share away. A few extra steps are well worth the time and effort. Take that, Twitter!