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As a browser, Safari is pretty sparse when it comes to behavior add-ons and extensions. This is primarily because while officially supported plugins for media-types DO exist, there isn’t an official plugin architecture for behavior based extensions. Developers have managed to work around this inconvenience using Input Manager hacks, but purists like to make it very clear: Input Managers are not plugins! (check out the link — you can see me get reprimanded and totally schooled over my second TUAW blog post!)

Semantics aside, tools like Saft and Inquisitor totally make Safari more fun to use. Now a new “not a plugin” plugin has joined the fray: Thurly. Thurly, by Elixir Graphics, is a really neat tool that not only acts as a URL shortener, but also lets you share the URL on Twitter, all within the web browser.

This is how it works, you install Thurly (and unlike most Input Manager “hacks,” Thurly is very easy to install or uninstall) and then, once you press Control-Command-T in Safari, a window overlay appears and you can shorten the current URL and then tweet it, along with a message, directly from that pane. You can even avoid the URL shortening aspect and just use it as a quick way to tweet from Safari.