Twitter harnessed for charity donations

A new service has been launched to raise money for charity through microblogging service Twitter.

Skimlinks's good.ly project lets users recommend items for purchase via a link placed in their tweets to their followers, the Evening Standard reports.

Those who click on the link and buy the product in question will see a proportion of the price of the item automatically go to charity.

Alicia Navarro, founder of Skimlinks, said that she was a "huge fan" of Twitter and wanted to harness the social media site for a good cause.

"I had already developed most of the technology for a commercial version so it was relatively simple to alter it for Twitter," she explained.

URL shortening services are already popular on Twitter as they offer a way of squeezing links into posts that can be no more than 140 characters in length.

It recently emerged that Twitter has now made bit.ly the default URL shortening service for its users over rival TinyURL, which it had been using since its launch.

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