firefox: bit.ly links in the sidebar of a customised wordpress blog gives a 404 error

I have twitter status updates showing on the sidebar of the blog which often has the bit.ly or ow.ly links as well. But everytime I click on it in the firefox browser it gives me a 404 error because it tries for the following url: www.domain.com/blog/"http://bit.ly/uniquenumber" instead of bit.ly/uniquenumber.

I just checked it and it seems to work on google chrome on mac but not on firefox on mac os x. Does anybody else have similar problems.

Below is the code of receiving the twitter status updates:

/* These prefixes and suffixes will display before and after the entire block of tweets. */  
    $prefix = ""; // Prefix - some text you want displayed before all your tweets.  
    $suffix = ""; // Suffix - some text you want displayed after all your tweets.  
    $tweetprefix = ""; // Tweet Prefix - some text you want displayed before each tweet.  
    $tweetsuffix = "<br \><br \>"; // Tweet Suffix - some text you want displayed after each tweet.  

    $feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1" . $limit;  

    function parse_feed($feed, $prefix, $tweetprefix, $tweetsuffix, $suffix) {  

    $feed = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $feed);  
    $feed = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $feed);  
    $clean = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);  

    $amount = count($clean) - 1;  

    echo $prefix;  

    for ($i = 1; $i <= $amount; $i++) {  
    echo $tweetsuffix;
    $cleaner = explode("</content>", $clean[$i]);  
    echo $tweetprefix;  
    echo $cleaner[0]; echo $suffix; echo $tweetsuffix;  ?>

    <img src="<?php echo get_bloginfo('template_directory');?>/images/side.png" alt="A line dividing the twitter updates and the open courses listing">
    <?php 
    }    
    echo $suffix;  
    }  

    $twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);  
    parse_feed($twitterFeed, $prefix, $tweetprefix, $tweetsuffix, $suffix); 

Figured it out for you. Change this:

$feed = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $feed);  
$feed = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $feed);  

to this

$feed = str_replace("&lt;", "<", $feed);  
$feed = str_replace("&gt;", ">", $feed);  
$feed = str_replace("&quot;", '"', $feed);