AVG Technologies, the company behind the very popular anti-virus scanning software has launched a new feature. This new feature is extremely handy for those who are active on Twitter. Twitter messages often contain short URLs, but it is unpredictable which ones have links to viruses and which ones don’t.

AVG’s LinkScanner scans websites as you browse them to make sure that malway is not contained in them. If there is malware, the Internet user is blocked from revisiting the website. Twitter themselves use the Google Safe Browsing API to check websites that Google has blacklisted to make sure that there aren’t any short URLs connected to them. Twitter deletes the post immediately after detecting the malware-contained short URL.

AVG’s LinkScanner service track the malware websites in real-time. Short URLs are scanned by LinkScanner which can find bad links within GMail, Digg, MySpace and Bebo.

TA Associates is a private equity firm that has offices in Boston, Menlo Park, Mumbai and London. The company manages about $16 billion in capital. Recently the company bought 25% ownership in AVG Technologies, the company behind one of the most useful anti-virus software programs in the world. The 25% ownership cost TA $200 million.

The equity was purchased from AVG shareholders Enterprise Investors, Benson Oak Capital, and Intel Capital. AVG was founded in 1991 and has about 80 million users across 167 countries. In 2008, AVG had revenues of about $140 million. The investment in AVG will be used to fund expansion globally and add-on deals.

AVG and Yahoo! already have some sort of partnership where Yahoo.com is the default search for the AVG toolbar. Back in 2005, Intel and Enterprise invested $52 million in AVG whe n the company had about 25 million users.