Short URL addresses have changed the way we share links on the internet. Short URLs have their advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is having a link that is easier to share so that more people will remember the link and less of a chance of it being wrongly written. A Short URL can also be useful if you have a limited space to write, for example, in Twitter where the limit is 140 characters. Also, in an email, a short URL isn’t as error prone to having breaks in it than a longer URL.

However there are also disadvantages for short URLs, since you cannot see the end link of a short URL, you can be led to spam or shock sites. However their are solutions to this problem, having a preview link, so that the user knows the end link. Another problem is that if the URL service crashes then all the links registered with that service don’t work.

In this blog post I’ll be outlining my favourite and the most common short URL services and deciding which is the best.

TinyURL

Probably the most common truncator service around. TinyURL has common features such as an easily remembered domain, fairly short URLs, preview link, custom alias and a bookmarklet. TinyURL says it has around 154 million URLs in its database, this doesn’t allow them to have the shortest link (6 characters).

TinyURL is also prone to crashing, since it is the post popular service on the web it receives over 1.5 billion hits a month, this can lead it to get overloaded and crash, meaning your links don’t work.

There are also many features that TinyURL does not have, such as statistics on your URL, being able to register account to keep track of your links and choosing whether a URL is public or private but overall it does the job well.

is.gd

The main drawing card to is.gd is that it creates one of the shortest links. is.gd can create a URL that is only 7 characters (including punctuation). However like TinyURL is.gd lacks a few features, customisation, stats etc.

One feature of is.gd I really like is their bookmarklet for Firefox. This is a little button that sits in the Firefox toolbar, click it and it automatically shortens the link of the page that you are currently on and copies the new shortened link to the clipboard. So with one click you have your short URL ready to be pasted anywhere.

bit.ly

This shortener service boasts features that most sites don’t have. You can to sign up to an account so that you can track all your links, view information for each link, number of clicks etc. It also has common features such as a bookmarklet, easily remembered name and an option for a custom alias.

I really like this service as it combines features and simplicity equally so that the user can have the best experience.

Google Short Links

This is my favourite service and the one I use most often. What I love about Google Short Links is the ability to have your domain in the URL. For example instead of the short URL being tinyurl.com/1234 it is instead ant.geek.nz/1234. This is great for me because when someone sees the short URL they are curious and visit the parent URL (ant.geek.nz) which generates traffic for this blog! Great huh? Other than this Google Short Links has other great features such as statistics for each link, a bookmarklet and an option whether to make the link private or public.

This service is available with Google Labs for Google Apps.

Lenks

Developed and coded by Rowan, Lenks offers features that no other short URL services offer. For example, huge customisation options when you sign up and the ability to put your links in various folders, humour, informational etc. Lenks also gives you the ability to view other Lenk user links via their profile. With AJAX fast speed Lenks is definitely a short URL service to start using.

Of course Lenks has features common to all short URL services. Overall I highly recommend this service!

The Winner

My favourite short URL service is Google Short Links. I love this service as it is used by only me on my domain. It may not have as many features as other services but the features it does have majorly outweigh the features that are missing. Since this is a Google Labs project we can expect to see many more features to come.

Runnerups are Lenks and is.gd. What I love about Lenks is that it is feature rich. It has a lot of features that most truncate services don’t have. Lenks is still in beta so we can expect to see more great things. On the other side is is.gd, a very simple URL truncator, the stand out feature for me is the one click URL shortener feature, this makes it so easy to post a short link. I hope that other services take after is.gd in this regard.

So there we have it! Of course I only reviewed a sample of short URL services, there are many more avaliable for you to test out!

Have fun linking!

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The great thing about Twitter is the use of third party applications with Twitter. The Twitter web interface really isn’t the most convenient way to tweet for us all (however there has been a great redesign). In this blog post I will outline my favourite Twitter web apps, these are great not only for tweeting but for finding information and fun from ours, our friends and the Twitterverses tweets.

TweetStats:

TweetStats is one of the best statistical tools for Twitter out there. It lists many stats about the way, you tweet, when you tweet and even what you tweet. TweetStats gives you statistics on how many times you tweet a month, aggregate daily tweets, aggregate hourly tweets, interface used and so on.

Another awesome feature is the TweetCloud. Basically like a tag cloud, but words that appear most often in your tweets. Best of all you can look up the stats of any Twitter user you know. The only downfall is if you want to refresh your stats, you can only do that every 8 hours and you have to retype in your username, except for that it really is an exceptional service.

Twitterfeed:

If you run a blog then Twitter is a great tool to direct traffic to your posts. As we all know its a huge pain to remember to tweet our blog posts. With Twitterfeed the hard work is done for you.

Twitterfeed can automatically check your blogs RSS feed from 30 minutes intervals and you can specify how many blog posts it lists. You can also change the opening text such as “New Blog Post:” for your kind of blog.

TweetWheel:

Twitter can also be about building a community of like minded people. However its a pain looking through your friends followers and so on to see who follows who. TweetWheel really simplifies this problem, by creating a unique wheel you can really see who know who on your Twitter profile and who you should maybe stop following.

One problem with TweetWheel is if you have a slow internet connection and follow lots of people and your friends follow lot of people it can take an age to load the page.

TwitPic:

The old saying goes “a picture can paint a thousand words”, a tweet can only say 160 characters. This is where TwitPic comes to play. TwitPic gives you the ability to share photos with your Twitter friends easilly.

You don’t even need a unique login, TwitPic utilises the Twitter API so the only login you have to give is your Twitter login. Photos are a breeze to upload and share.

Twitscoop:

Twitscoop is quite a cool service which can be a source of some fun. Twitscoop shows in the form of a “tweet cloud”, telling you trending topics in real time. For example A search can often show up word such as “2am”, “3am” etc as people realize that the are up late.

Twitscoop describes there process as:

Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no joke here).

Quite a unique service that should definately be checked out.

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