In a Url
Twitter has become a tremendously popular platform for conversing with a large amount of people. One of its greater points is that those conversations are required to stay within a small amount of characters (140 to be exact). This leads to problems when you want to share links that are hugely long along with information about them. A long time ago…maybe late 2008 the ideal way to share these long links was with a shortening program called tinyurl. Everywhere you looked on twitter there was a tiny url reference that would resolve the clicker to its original state. Things began to change very shortly and in a very quick manner.
Tweetdeck is probably one of single most powerful desktop applications for managing the Twitter stream. Sure you could do the old school thing and navigate to the web page but that is just boring. Within Tweetdeck you can auto shrink urls and you have a healthy option of shrinking services. Lets take a look for just one sec…and yep, here we have it the choices Tweetdeck delves out: bit.ly, budURL, eweri, hex.io, idek.net, is.gd, lin.cr,POPrl, snipurl, tinyurl, twurl, urlBorg, zi.ma. With all those choices, even many I do not even know about, where do you start in your search for the perfect url shortener?
Lets focus on my favorite ones of the above bunch and therefore the ones that should peak the most interest (tinyurl, is.gd, bit.ly, snipurl, and twurl). The first set is tinyurl and is.gd. Now these are your run of the mill url shorteners, sure is.gd has a cool name and a very sleek and somewhate..bloated interface but, they basically have the same functionality; they shorten your url in about 1 - 3 clicks (depending if you use copy and paste to copy the url). Although this may be true, tinyURL has experienced numerous hours of downtime and people have reported to have URL’s broken in the fray. So if you are out for some simple URL shortening take on the folks at is.gd.
For everyone else out there who wants to do more then simply shorten your URLs look at snip.url, twurl, or bit.ly. These services allow you to track the amount of clicks or clickthroughs that your shortened URLs generate on…say twitter or your personal web page. Twurl is really for the people who concentrate all of their URL shortening towards the twitter crowd so if this is not you then keep your paws away from Twurl, mainly because I love it. Bit.ly and snipURL are for the everyday URL shortening geeks out there that want to make their ugly urls just a bit cleaner for the crowd. In addition, snipURL seems to be getting a lot of talk these days with its slick interface and well layed out site. Kudoos to the folks at Snip.
So folks of the newer web media phase, or simply the people wondering what most of those options are, there you have it. I also hope you guys stick around and comment up when I get my comment system working which should be within the weeks time. Until then, be very, very loving, peace!
