Spam and phishing have been ongoing problems at Twitter for some time, and tonight the company announced that it is stepping up its efforts to stop them with some new features, described as being able to “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links.”

In a blog post, Twitter writes that the protection works by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.”

How exactly they do that, we’re not sure, but Twitter notes that you’ll start seeing short links using its own “twt.tl” URL shortener in direct messages and email notifications. As users who have been victimized by phishing scams (and those annoyed by the constant barrage of dodgy DMs) can likely attest, it’s a feature whose time has most certainly come.

All right Tweetdeck fans, rev up your engines and prepare to update to Tweetdeck 0.33, which adds a slew of new features, better API management and more in-Tweetdeck media previews.

We could list all the new features in Tweetdeck0.33, but the company was nice enough to make this little video that shows everything off:

Some of the highlights:

Tweetdeck Can Manage Your Twitter API Usage — This means that the program can delegate how to use your available API calls so that the most important info gets to you as easily as possible. Plus, Tweetdeck now uses OAuth and can request up to 350 API calls an hour, and that is expected to increase soon.

Better Column Management — You can now view Flickr, YouTube and Posterous media within Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is free.