A big hi to all hashZERO readers and subscribers! Well, this is not Kishore by the way. This is Yusuf (@myusufm), a guest poster at hashZERO for now and i hope i will soon become a regular editor here

Lets get down to the topic now - Ten short URLs to make long URLs short.

What do you do when you see an URL that your friend has asked you to check out in your e-mail?  Something thats as long as this- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Surya/18849309245?sid=445017676f0ec0c402ccb826ac8139ab

OR even worse, an URL like this - http://cgi.ebay.com/WD-2-5-320GB-EXTERNAL-PORTABLE-USB-2-0-HARD-DISK-DRIVE_W0QQitemZ350211156772QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item518a362b24&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12%7C66%3A2%7
C39%3A1%7C72%3A1234%7C240%3A1308%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50

The first link is the page of a kollywood actor at facebook.com and the second is the search listing of an item at ebay.com.

The worst case is when you have to copy the whole link from the e-mail and paste it in the new page of a browser.  Trouble arises when you miss some letters and you end up getting a 404 error. Links from emails are just an example, your friend may drop an url in your chat window and in that case, you become a little annoyed before you copy the whole link. Also if  you wanted to text web addresses to a mobile phone, shortening them would be the best bet.

This is where URL shortener websites step in to help you. Lets see ten of these websites for now.

For example, consider one of our very own posts at hashZERO - http://hashzero.com/2009/05/visual-studio-2010-and-net-framework-4-beta-1-download/. This link is long and if you want to pass on this link to your friend or to your own blog, things might get a little dull.

( no offence on the title and link kishore )

Lets get down to the listing;

#1 : The obvious website you might have guessed as soon as you saw the title of this post - TINYURL.COM

TinyURL was one of the first in the shortening url field and they are pretty impressive. They offer previewing the URLs before you actually go and visit them and the best part is where they offer redirection to any of the website’s inner pages.

For example - if http://tinyurl.com/hzero is the tinyURL of http://hashzero.com, then you can append /2009/05 to the tinyURL to visit the may 2009 archive of hashZERO.

#2 : The most used URL shortener in twitter ( as far as i know ) - BIT.LY

Bit.ly is used by top organizations’ twitter users such as microsoft and google. Bit.ly offers statistics for the URLs that you have created. Like how many visitors have ended up clicking the URL and from which geographical location, which referrer(email, IMs, websites etc) . The name is so small that you could very easily use at twitter and keep a track on how many people have clicked on the link that you tweeted. It would be of some help though. Bit.ly offers a preview plugin for firefox using which you could find out the target page, the Page Title, Long URL, and any Click Data about the page the URL links to, whenever you hover over a bit.ly URL on any web page. This plugin finds out target page for other shortener services such as tinyurl as well.

#3 : easyURL.net

easyURL offers six domains from which you could choose from for your URL shortening. They differ from others on the fact that they hate spam redirects and do not create redirects for URLs listed in SURBL.org. Search engines are disallowed from all their redirects.

#4 : Yep.it

yep.it was chosen by me because of its small domain length because smaller the shortener url, the shorter the short URL is!. Yep.it is open in offering real time statistics. They list some of the recently added and recently clicked yep.it URLs. Short and long URLs are classified accordingly.

#5:  URL.ie

Again as above, the name is small and the more preference by people to use small names which they can easily remember and tell it to friends. After creating the URL, they offer codes and options to post the URL at twitter, facebook, forums etc.

#6 : SnipURL.com

One of my favorite URL shortener services before i came across bit.ly. Many consider Snipurl / Snurl / Snipr / Sn.im the best in URL shorteners. All short URLs are called “snips” and they offer to manage your snippings, display vital statistics and they offer a private key addition to your snips. This will prevent others from ‘guessing’ your snips as they are just 4digits after snipurl.com/. Snipurl has the extra edge over others where it creates RSS feeds for your URL and gives you the option to modify the target of your short URL too.! Snippetty snip snip!

#7  : DiggURL.com

A fancy webpage made with AJAX providing URL shortener service. Although the service is quite new, it is slowly gaining some momentum among netizens.  As many others, diggurl has AJAX interface, offers custom tags and the new addition is to password protect your URL. Detailed statistics such as refererrs, location etc. You could make your link expire on the date you specify. This would be helpful for affiliate marketing where in you would say the link won’t be available after some time and it really would be true!. Bulk submission of URLs is also an option at diggurl.

#8 : is.gd

Compress that address is their tagline and they claim to have over 15,000,000 URLs shortened so far by them. After shortening the URL, it displays the amount of compression that your long URL has undergone. example: The e-bay url that i placed at the beginning of this post, when shortened by is.gd got 93% (257 characters) shorter it showed.  is.gd offers a bookmarklet called as the ‘magic’ link, their own Firefox plugin and you can add additional keywords to shortened URLs too. is.gd doesn’t mind about words placed after a slash(/) after the original shortened URL.

#9 : tiny.cc

Like all URL shortener services, tiny.cc also does the same job of shrinking the long URLs that you paste on their form. Difference was there when they offered preview to all tiny.cc short urls, i.e they will show you a thumbnail of the target page before you land up visiting the page. But this  is undesirable to many and they have scrapped it for now. Also are services of traffic statistics monitoring for y0ur tiny.cc short urls and they offer two toolbar shortcuts that you could add to your browser for instant microblogging. They have not denied access to short urls at tiny.cc/ ; so all short urls at tiny.cc are indexed by search engines.

#10 : twi.cc

You just want a light weight website that will just make your long urls short and will give you the result?  twi.cc is  the one for you. With a super fast loading website and using minimal scripts with just two tabs, this is for all those who just want a short url and nothing else. If you come across any block of texts with long urls in the text, you can paste the block into twi.cc and get all those long urls in the block of text replaced in a second. As simple as that!.

Well, that wraps up my list of ten short URLs to make long URLs shorter. This is not an exhaustive list though, just my compilation after some research of most used websites for URL shortening by people around me. There are lots of other websites that offer this service and if i have missed out your favorite one, feel free to share in comments as feedback is always welcomed here at hashZERO.

To conclude this post, here is the short URL link of this post, if you want to share with your friends : http://bit.ly/make-url-short

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