Shortening and utilizing URLs

by Axel Drefahl • www.axeleratio.com

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 Shortening, sharing and tracking of links.
Google url shortener http://goo.gl Shortens and provides analytics for site with the shortened URL
J2j.de http://J2j.de. Do it in German for fun: Lange Adressen kurz machen. Anyway, shortening (almost) disguises the language background!
TinyURL http://tinyurl.com Creates tiny URLs that will not break in email postings.
TwitThis! http://www.twitthis.com 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

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:


Service Obtained URL Length
No service—original http://www.axeleratio.com/ip/encoding/unicode/mathSymbDescriptNotation.htm 74
bit.ly http://bit.ly/biBUNX 20
J2j.de http://J2j.de/ANkzio (works unfortunately via an intermediate page) 20
Google url shortener http://goo.gl/byCj
Analytics: http://goo.gl/info/byCj#week
18
TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/2cjwc22 26
TwitThis! http://twitthis.com/i3ld46 26

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