URL shorteners and why you should use them
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are the addresses of the internet. They are what you type into the top of your web browser to go to a website. Like everyone needs a pair of shoes (ok almost everyone) the internet needs URLs. With websites and blogs being started on a daily basis and “social sharing” gaining SPAM like traction these seemingly meaningless lengths of characters have actually started to become pretty damn important.
So why do we use URL shorteners? Well, for two mean reasons. The first is to make your URL’s more manageable. When you have a URL like http://www.jimsandsallysfamilyblog.com/2010/02/17/the-day-we-all-decided-to-start-shortening-our-urls it is plain to see why having a smaller 20 odd character URL would be much easier to share. The other reason is to save characters. With services such as Twitter only having 140 characters at your disposal, it is quite easy to see why having http://www.jimsandsallysfamilyblog.com/…shortening-urls would be a big waste of valuable real estate.
You can, however, gain quite a bit more from URL shortening depending on what shortening service you use. Some services such as bit.ly (mentioned below) track and compile click data such as displays, clicks and location information which can be very useful. Some of the shortening services have even taken it a step further and display popular links which gives you even more reason to use them.
The URL shortening market has become saturated with every guy, girl and their cousin starting a new one. There are a few keepers though and for various reasons they have made our list that we want to share with you.
bit.ly (http://bit.ly)
bit.ly Logo
bit.ly is our favourite service – yes we use them. The URL is short and the data they supply is very valuable like clicks, views, click location (country), time of the clicks and what your link is doing in the social sphere. The API also allows you to plug into their service and shorten the URL’s you share automatically when sharing things such as your lastest blog post.
TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com)
TinyURL Logo
TinyURL has been around for ages. In fact it was one of the first URL shorteners I used. As you will notice it looks like it has not been updated since it was made (I don’t think it ever has) but it still does exactly what you went there to do. The feature that really stands out is the ability to create your own alias. The gives you the ability to have an “easier to remember” shortened URL such as http://tinyurl.com/txdaily.
tr.im (http://tr.im)
tr.im Logo
tr.im is the first of the 12 character URL shorteners we have in our list. The first feature that sets it apart from the rest is that it has the least characters to start off with than other shorteners we have mentioned here already. Having that and a full set of analytics for you to get that oh so important click information, tr.im is actually one of the best we have come across so far.
is.gd (http://is.gd)
is.gd Logo
is.gd is the next 12 character service. With no tracking of how you short URL is doing the only thing that is.gd has is that it only costs you 12 characters and up to a maximum of 18. We did like their explanation of how may characters the will add depending on how many URL’s they have shortened. This means we will only get 6 characters added when they hit 916,132,832 shortened URLs. It has only used a tenth of that at the moment.
We could go on and on but those are the four services we think do the job well. There are thousands of services out there that offer it, even Google have one for their products such as Buzz, so if you have one that you think is better or you would like to share please comment below. We will check it out.
This was posted by Seagyn Davis who has posted 212 items.
→ Keeping Short URLs in Mzansi (South Africa) – Tx Daily said on: February 19, 2010 at 1:01 pm
[...] on Twitter, which is pretty average in the greater scheme of things and having such a variety of URL Shorteners to choose from it has not sold us [...]