August 25th, 2009

Short And Tweet: TweetMeme Introduces An URL Shortener Of Its Own

As if we needed yet another URL shortening service, TweetMeme is today debuting ReTwt.me in an effort to make that particular saturated field even more so. And it’s not like it does anything special in comparison with the plethora of similar services out there.

It shrinks longer links in order to make them more tweetable (and retweetable), it gives you some options to share links from its main… → Read More

August 18th, 2009

Ow.ly And Bit.ly Fastest, Most Reliable URL Shorteners. Tr.Im Comes Up . . . Short.

When it comes to shortening links, the brevity of the URL is not the only factor you should consider. Speed and reliability are also important. After all, the main purpose of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and TinyURL are to redirect you back to the original (long) link someone shortened in the first place. You want the redirect to be fast and reliable.

The rise of Twitter and its… → Read More

May 6th, 2009

URL Shortening Wars: Twitter Ditches TinyURL For bit.ly

Sharing links on Twitter can be quite a pain when you need to input a web address that consumes most of the space you have at your disposal for your micro-message. The startup realized that quickly and automatically started shortening long URLs to make its users save on space for their 140-character updates.

To get this implemented, Twitter went with TinyURL, a service that shortens URLs down… → Read More

April 19th, 2009

More Ways To Shorten Those URLs: UnHub And Lnk.by

URL shortening services are a dime a dozen, and despite wishes for them to vanish (with good reason) they’re here to stay and more popular than ever given the abundance of social services that thrive on short messages and links. TinyURL and bit.ly appear to be the more popular of the bunch, but we’re seeing other services use their own custom URL shortening services at an increasing rate. To name… → Read More

April 6th, 2009

Are URL Shorteners A Necessary Evil, Or Just Evil?

One of the most viral activities on the Web is sharing links. It is fast and easy, and a good way to communicate ideas. What started out as something people did via e-mail and bookmark-sharing services like Delicious, is now moving to Facebook, Twitter, and other social broadcasting services. It is just so much more efficient to share a link once with all your friends and followers than to send… → Read More

March 30th, 2009

If bit.ly Is Worth $8 Million, TinyURL Is Worth At Least $46 Million

In a world where everything is being jammed into 140 characters or less, shorter is better. That goes double (or is it half?) for lengthy URLs. So-called URL shortening services are increasingly becoming indispensable to anyone who uses Twitter. It is the only practical way to share links on the service.

Today, one of these URL shortening services, bit.ly, raised $2 million, sparking the… → Read More

February 26th, 2009

Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest

A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.

Then there is… → Read More

September 16th, 2008

Look.Fo Makes It Easy to Send Google Search Results

TinyURL is the place to go if you have a long URL that you want to cut down for friends, but if you’re looking for a way to easily send Google search results to them without picking a specific page, Look.fo lets you send them an exact link to your query in a simple style: look.fo/your search query.

I had the opportunity to try out Look.fo and it works as advertised. The page’s design is simple… → Read More

June 26th, 2008

TinyPaste: Like TinyURL…for Text

Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit. Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps on message lengths. But instead of directing users to a… → Read More