Tired of trying to point your friends to that one picture on Facebook, or that great blog post with the ridiculously long URL (web address)? There’s a solution out there for you. Many websites have started offering URL shortening services. What is URL shortening?
Imagine you want to point someone to an article in InfoTech Tuesday and the article’s URL is itnews.itac.k-state.edu/2009/07/simplify-internet-browsing-by-using-tabs/ . Obviously, that URL is too long and difficult to dictate to someone. What if, instead of that gargantuan URL, you could give them tinyurl.com/muzhwa or bit.ly/3WASwn?
Those are a lot more manageable and won’t take up an entire line in an e-mail, which is the beauty of URL shortening. Numerous websites are offering these services. The two demonstrated above are TinyURL and bit.ly. Both are excellent services that provide quick and easy-to-use URL shortening.
Bit.ly does offer one feature that is different from TinyURL; it provides statistics on the clicks of your shortened URL. If you visit bit.ly/info/3WASwn, you’ll see the stats for the URL posted above. These stats are very detailed. You can see if anyone has tweeted or posted your URL on FriendFeed as well as any clicker’s location and what websites have referred your link.
These services have gained popularity as the social networking site Twitter increases in popularity. With a limit of 140 characters per tweet, long URLs are impossible to include. Sites like TinyURL strive to keep their URLs at 25 characters or less, thus freeing up more characters for the message delivered with the link.
