Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Don’t you like long and unmemorizable URLs? Do you hate to write tens of characters in browser’s bar or simply don’t like those never ending URLs full of parameters?
I think you better prefer something easier, nicer, more memorizable, don’t you? URL shortening services allows you to do so. You can have short, clean and good looking URLs just by one click! Let’s take a closer look to five of them.
TinyURL
This is probably the oldest and thus the most known URL shortening service. One of the bigest advantages of this URL shortening tool is, that links created by you will never expire. The browser’s toolbar offered by TinyURL is also a big plus. Once installed (simply by drag and drop), you’ll be able to make a TinyURL at the click of a button. By clicking on the toolbar button, a TinyURL will be created for the page you are currently at. There’s one more interesting feature of this URL shortening service – custom alias of shortened URL.
SnipURL
SnipURL is a URL shortening service with a social twist.
Main features
SnipURL also offers drag and drop installation of browser toolbar.
MooURL
Moo, moo, moo… Yes this cute URL shortening service is based on the Moo philosophy. If you have a really loooong URL, just paste it in the text field, and MooURL will milk it, creating a moourl for you. It lasts forever, it’s automatically copied to your clipboard, and it’s really cute.
Rurl
This URL shortening service is focused primarily for mobile devices. About 19 characters long urls are good for Twitter too. Rurl offers the API for developers to build Rurl short urls into their next application
Shorl
Shorl has a very clean interface without a lot of ads, plus you can sign up for an account to retrieve the statistics of the shortened links. This URL shortening service offers drag and drop browser’s toolbar too. Shorl created very interesting project called Koremutake which facilitates the memorizing of urls.