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A short URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is appreciated whenever one
has to type a URL manually. Further, microblogging
services, by definition, provide limited space to post content. Therein,
a short URL is sufficient
to enable a click without taking away valuable context space. By browsing
tweets in Twitter timelines,
you'll recognize frequent use of brief URLs.
There are various online services providing URL shortening tools. Check out
the
Long List of URL Shorteners.
On this page, I am describing and testing a small subset of shortening tools
to illustrate performance and shortening results.
| Service |
URL |
Description & Notes |
| bit.ly |
http://bit.ly
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Shortening, sharing and tracking of links.
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| Google url shortener |
http://goo.gl
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Shortens and provides analytics for site with the shortened URL
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| J2j.de |
http://J2j.de.
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Do it in German for fun: Lange Adressen kurz machen.
Anyway, shortening (almost) disguises the language background!
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| TinyURL |
http://tinyurl.com
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Creates tiny URLs that will not break in email postings.
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| TwitThis! |
http://www.twitthis.com
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This is not a shortening service per se. TwitThis shortens an
entered URL while sending it within a tweet to a Twitter account, into
which you are authorized to sign in on pop-up request.
Also see:
Target and twirl your tweets via Twitter add-ons
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Hands-on URL shortening
I used the following URL to test the above shortening services:
http://www.axeleratio.com/ip/encoding/unicode/mathSymbDescriptNotation.htm
Here are the results:
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