blogging crew

Tinyurl.com is a brilliant service. If you’re new to blogging and don’t know anything about it, tinyurl.com allows you to transform really long URLs (Unique Resource Locator – or the web address to you and me) into shorter and user friendly ones.

As an example, the ‘real’ URL of this post is http://bloggingcrew.com/2009/05/short-url/ and by using tinyurl.com the shortened version is http://tinyurl.com/cjbtxo. Reducing it from 42 characters to 25.

In situations where you have a limited space or characters to use, in Twitter for example, where there are only 140 to play with (20 less than a standard text message), it becomes very useful.

A couple of months ago I came across an even better URL shortening service called bit.ly. With bit.ly you can track the stats behind the short link, like how many clicks it got, where the links came from, which country the user was in when he/she clicked and so on. If used with Twitter, the service also tells you if your message has been re-tweeted. It’s all updated in real time too!

If you’re curious, http://bit.ly/psIFY (only 19 characters) is the shortened version of this post!