Shorten Web Addresses

No doubt you’ve heard of TinyURL and SnipURL, which allow you to enter a long web address (a URL, uniform resource locator) and produce a simple short address for sharing with friends via email, Tweeting or Plurking or otherwise spreading around without the risk of the URL breaking in a linebreak or spilling over the allowed wordcount on microblogging platforms. The following post www.sciencetext.com/one-more-reason-to-use-opendns.html becomes: http://tinyurl.com/6×77v7, http://snipurl.com/3ajsy, or http://bit.ly/2XzNQi, using the new kid on the snippety snip block, bit.ly

The great thing about bit.ly is that it adds some seriously useful features lacking in the earlier web 1.0 URL shortening systems, including analytics and the option to create a URL with a keyword instead of an alphanumeric string, so that URL I shortened could be http://bit.ly/opendns instead. I assume these bit.ly keyword URLs are persistent, so one might expect a landgrab for all the best keywords some time soon. It also caches the pages at the end of shortened URLs.

Other URL shortening systems include: metamark, notlong, and thinfi gives you the option to password protect your shortened URLs.