URL shortening services like TinyURL are great if you're trying to convey a lot of information in a tiny amount of space. For example, if you want to share a link with your friends on Twitter. But if you're a cautious web surfer who prefers to know where a link will lead you before clicking, LongURL can help.
All you have to do is copy and paste a shortened URL into the text box on LongURL, and the site will let you know where the link leads. Better yet, you can install a Firefox extension or Greasemonkey script that will automatically show you the full URL for any shortened URL whenever you mouse over one.
LongURL supports more than a dozen popular URL shortening services including TinyURL, SnipURL, and Tweetburner.
URL-shortening services are plentiful these days, but they're not all equal. There are a few key features we're looking for in our ideal URL-shrinker. We want a bookmarklet, to avoid needless copy-pasting. We want a short base URL for easy Twittering. There's also the ability to custom-name your URLs, so you can tell them apart and they make sense to the people you're sending to. Bit.ly has all of this and more.
Bookmarklet? Check. Short base URL? Check. The only shorter one we've seen is is.gd. Custom naming? Sure thing. But the real kicker is Bit.ly's unique feature: it tracks how many clicks your link gets, and shows you the referrers those clicks are coming from. If someone else has made a different Bit.ly address for that same URL, you can see that, too. Don't be surprised if you see more and more Bit.ly links popping up soon, it might be the best out there right now.
TinyURL is the grandaddy of URL shortening services. Want to take a long URL and squeeze it into an easy to email, tweet, or otherwise share package? Just plop it into TinyURL and the service will spit out a short string of characters you can share with others. But historically those characters have been pretty much meaningless, making TinyURL addresses difficult to remember.
TinyURL recently rolled out the ability to create custom domains. Just type in a word or phrase that you want to associate with the longer URL, and you could get a domain like http://tinyurl.com/downloadsquad. There's just one catch: If someone's already used the URL, you can't use it. So you might want to use the name of your web site, spouse, or dog sparingly. Otherwise you'll wind up with someting like http://tinyurl.com/downloadsquad4h85sy.
There are dozens of services that let you shorten long URLs so it's easier to copy and paste them into emails, instant messages, or micro-blogging services like Twitter. TinyPaste does basically the same thing -- but with chunks of text.
Here's how it works. Say you want to write a short book explaining in explicit detail everything you've done today. And you want to share it with all of your Twitter followers. Unfortunately Twitter has a 140 character limit. What do you do? You cheat by writing your diatribe into a TinyPaste text box and clicking submit. What you get is a short URL that you can paste into Twitter. Anyone who clicks will see the full text of your unreasonably long narrative.
Of course, you could also just write your story on a blog or other web site and use TinyURL or another service to shorten the URL. But what's the fun in using a full service blogging client with rich text formatting tools when you can use TinyPaste's plain text box?
In all seriousness, if you don't have a blog but want to share something with a bunch of people quickly, we can see how TinyPaste could come in handy. But it does seem a bit like a solution in search of a problem.
We're big fans of software that does one thing and does it well. But we also have a soft spot in our hearts for jack of all trades style applications. And EggJax almost falls into the latter category. Except we're not entirely sure why all of these trades are in the same package. Here are the five things you can do from the EggJax page:
Reverse phone number lookup
People finder (enter a name, city, and state and try to find a street address and phone number)
Now, maybe it's just us, but one or two of these things are not like the other. Sure, we can imagine a situation where you're looking up an old friend in the city you grew up in, want to find the company where he now works, and then want to check the weather forecast for next week so you know whether to bring an umbrella when you show up to surprise him. But what's the TinyURL clipper for?
If you use your Windows Mobile phone or PDA for email, instant messaging, and even Twitter, you know how much fun it can be trying to copy and paste, or even just read incredibly long URLs on an incredibly tiny screen.
CeSnipURL is a free utility for Windows Mobile 6 devices that lets you shorten long web addresses without opening a web browser and visiting a URL shortening site like tinyURL or SnipURL. The utility automatically puts URLs from your clipboard into a conversion window when you launch the application.
After your conversion is complete, the new URL will also be copied to your clipboard. You can then enter shortened URLs in text messages, tweets, or other messages.
CeSnipURL was developed by Vince Koser, the same guy who designed ceTwit, a Windows Mobile Twitter client.
There are plenty of services out there that will take a long URL and make it shorter so that you can fit it in an email, IM or Twitter message. But sometimes you don't want your URL to be shorter and easier to read or remember. Sometimes you want it to be as long as humanly possible. Don't ask us when you would want that, just take our word for it. Fortunately, there's a service that can help. W-i-d-e-U-R-L will take your relatively short and easy to remember URL and lengthen it by essentially spelling it out. For example, www.downloadsquad.com becomes that behemoth you see above. But wait, there's more! Is that super-long URL a bit too much to remember? No problem, W-i-d-e-U-R-L features TinyURL integration, which lets you quickly condense any freshly created URL, thus closing an entirely pointless circle.
There's no shortage of services that let you convert long URLs into tiny ones. But there's one major problem with most URL shortening services: they make it tough to figure out exactly what you're clicking on. While this comes in handy if you're up for a little harmless rickrolling, if you share a NSFW (not safe for work) link over email, your blog, or Twitter, be prepared for some angry comments.
NSFW.in solves this problem by shortening your link and directing visitors to a warning page before pulling up the original link. On the off chance that you don't know what NSFW stands for, NSFW.in also makes it fairly clear that the site you're about to visit might not be something you want your co-workers to catch you looking at.
When you send a URL to a friend, it's probably a good idea to include a note letting them know why you sent it. But if you're too lazy for that, you could always just highlight the snippet of text you really want them to read. Awesome Highlighter lets you markup any web page and then share the results.
All you have to do is enter the URL of the page you want to highlight, and then select the text to highlight in yellow. When you're finished, just click the "Done" button in the Awesome Highlighter toolbar and the page will be saved to your account (if you haven't registered for an account pages will still be saved, but you won't be able to see them if you visit the site with another browser). You can also share links to highlighted pages with others using a TinyURL style shortened URL.
You spend the day scouring the web for funny, interesting, and gross articles to send to your friends, family, and colleagues. But is it really worth it? Do they even click the links you email them? LinkBlip provides an easy way to find out.
All you have to do is enter your email address and the URL you want people to click on. LinkBlip will spit out a TinyURL-style shortened link that you can share with anyone. When they click on the link, you'll receive an email. You also get a link to a site that will let you know how many times people have clicked on your link. In theory, you can also see the geographic location of those who click on your links, but we found that the results weren't particularly accurate.
Pasting long multipart links can be an unsightly waste of space when you're talking on IM, text, or Twitter. There are dozens of web services that will cut a URL down to size, but when you're dealing with a group of links, it can still take multiple copies and pastes to share everything.
LinkBunch is a service that does exactly what it sounds like it should do: condenses multiple URLs into one short address. Just paste them all into one text box, hit a button, and your new, slimmer URL is ready to go. Your days of sending just one LOLcat picture at a time are over!
When someone clicks on your LinkBunch, they're directed to a page that shows all the links you included. This would be handy by itself, but the LinkBunch developers took the obvious next step and added an "open entire bunch" button, which pops each link into a new tab.
The major feature we found missing from LinkBunch was a bookmarklet to automatically bunch all open tabs, which would mean even less copying and pasting. We'd also like to see direct links to open an entire bunch, without first going to the page and clicking. Fortunately, it looks like the developers plan to release a LinkBunch API, which means these features might not be missing for long.
Meaningful URL is a website designed under the same general principle of popular website Tiny URL. While Tiny URL just allows you to take a long URL and turn it into a short one, Meaningful URL takes the idea one step further and allows you to turn any URL into a short AND meaningful one.
Meaningful URL has a variety of tags to choose from for your URL with options ranging from "say.iloveyou.to" to "vote.to." After your tag selection you can put your recipients name or any other text you choose to personalize and finish your URL. Free Meaningful URLs expire 5 days after they are created with premium URLs available for $2-$3 a month.
Earlier today we showed you how to enable a preview for TinyUrls by using the 'Enable preview' feature from the TinyUrl website - allowing you to forgo the leap of faith these little links would usually require of you.
Wish there was a more elegant approach to the problem? Well, for Firefox users (and other browsers for which Greasemonkey is available) this has been solved, thanks to a Greasemonkey script that does for TinyUrl links what X-rays did for the world of medicine.
Once you have installed the script, all you have to do is hover over a TinyUrl link to see where it leads. So simple it's beautiful. And although you can always enable the TinyUrl preview option with a browser cookie from the TinyUrl website, it's not nearly as slick or integrated as the TinyUrl Popup Preview script.
So, if you're paranoid of people sneaking you weird links disguised in TinyUrls or simply want to know where that link in a tweet from a Twitter friend points to, the TinyUrl Popup Preview script for Greasemonkey fits the bill.
If you've spent more than a few minutes on the internet, you probably know that it's not usually a good idea to click on a link if you don't know where it takes you. The last thing you need is to visit a site that wants to install malware on your PC. Or almost as bad, a link that takes you to a site with explicit contact while you're at work, or perhaps using your mother's computer.
But popular URL-shortening services like TinyURL ask you to do exactly that: click on a link without really knowing where it will take you. Fortunately, TinyURL also offers a way to preview links before visiting them. All you have to do is visit TinyURL's preview page and click "enable previews." The service will add a cookie to your browser so that every time you click on a TinyURL link you'll first be taken to a page showing the complete URL. You can click "disable previews" to remove the cookie if you don't feel like going through a two step process every time you click on an abbreviated link in the future.
If you want to share a shortened link with others but make sure they always see the preview page, just add preview to the URL. For example, http://tinyurl.com/by8fm will take you to the Download Squad home page, while http://preview.tinyurl.com/by8fm will take you to a page letting you know that you're about to visit the Download Squad home page.
Okay, this one's been around for a little while, but it's worth sharing. You know how there are a hundred web services out there like TinyURL that let you take a web address and shrink it down to something easier to remember or post on your site?
Well, that's for wimps. What the world really needs is a way to make sure nobody can remember your URL. That's where hugeURL comes in.
Enter a URL, and hugeURL will add a whole bunch of absolutely unnecessary characters. See that block of text in the image on the right? That's what www.downloadsquad.com looks like when its huge-ified.
Is there any practical use for hugeURL? No. But as the website proclaims, it's "Because bigger is better, right?"
URL-shortening services are plentiful these days, but they're not all equal. There are a few key features we're looking for in our ideal URL-shrinker. We want a bookmarklet, to avoid needless copy-pasting. We want a short base URL for easy Twittering. There's also the ability to custom-name your URLs, so you can tell them apart and they make sense to the people you're sending to. Bit.ly has all of this and more. 
If you use your Windows Mobile phone or PDA for email, instant messaging, and even Twitter, you know how much fun it can be trying to copy and paste, or even just read incredibly long URLs on an incredibly tiny screen. 
Meaningful URL is a website designed under the same general principle of popular website Tiny URL. While Tiny URL just allows you to take a long URL and turn it into a short one, Meaningful URL takes the idea one step further and allows you to turn any URL into a short AND meaningful one.
Earlier today we showed you how to enable a preview for TinyUrls by using the 'Enable preview' feature from the TinyUrl website - allowing you to forgo the leap of faith these little links would usually require of you. 
Okay, this one's been around for a little while, but it's worth sharing. You know how there are a hundred web services out there like TinyURL that let you take a web address and shrink it down to something easier to remember or post on your site?
