5 Feb

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

By: Audrey Walker

Have you ever received an email with a super long link in it, but when you click on it, it sends you to a page not found? Try turning your link into a TinyURL. TinyURL.com is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently have long and cumbersome addresses.

Shorter URLs are better to work with because they are easier to remember, write down, copy and paste, and pass around. They’re great for spaces in which you are limited to the number of characters you are allowed to use such as Twitter and Facebook, and they’re less likely to break when you send them.

TinyURL.com randomly generates a tinyURL (shorter link) after a user pastes the long URL into a text field on the site and hits the make tinyurl button. A user also has the ability to make a custom TinyURL that is more meaningful and easier to repeat, such as http://tinyurl.com/stoneig.

Posted Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Filed Under Category: Web Design
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5

Responses to “Bigger Isn’t Always Better”

Rachel
February 5th, 2009 at 11:16 am

Great tip! You can also try these (free) URL shortening services:

- http://bit.ly/
- http://zi.ma/

Bob Orchard
February 5th, 2009 at 4:03 pm

I personally use http://www.w33.us to shorten my url’s because it’s completely simple and minimalist – with no ads. Thought I’d mention that as well. I used TinyUrl for the longest time – but it gets tiresome to see all the ads everywhere.

Edward Vielmetti
February 6th, 2009 at 2:44 pm

There’s a couple of other URL shortening services out there. I’m fond of http://bit.ly , in part because by default they provide an openly accessable statistics and analytics page for the link. See e.g.

http://bit.ly/info/a2parking

and

http://bit.ly/a2parking

for that.

The risk of tinyurl, bit.ly, and all of the others of these is that if your URL shortening service goes down or offline for whatever reason you lose. To believe in these for the long run you have to make some argument that they have the staying power and the cost and revenue model to stay up and working for a long time.

CoolStuffForDads.com
February 20th, 2009 at 8:27 am

This looks like a very cool tool. I often run into the issue where the very long URL gets cut off on the page wrap so it ultimately does not work. This looks like it would solve that. Thanks for the tip!

John Beckley
March 4th, 2009 at 9:57 am

Hi, does a tinyurl carry a google page rank value? I don’t think it does but it should, what do you think? JB

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