Top Three URL Shortening Sites

There are so many of them. They are very useful and make sharing web-sites extremely easy. There are many different services that provide a way for you to take a website link or its URL and shorten it. This allows you to send a link to a site that may have a link of thirty or forty characters but you will only have to send a link with about 10 or so characters.

How They Work
What these websites do is they will take you longer URL and they will give it a set page using their site and redirect to the page that you want to link to. For example, lets take this extremely long link, http://computersight.com/software/how-to-partitionformatdelete-a-hard-drive-partition/, if you past that into a site that will shrink it for you it will come out looking something like this. http://tinyurl.com/y49qhsa. It took 80 characters and cut them in half!

Different URL Shortening Sites

TinyURL.com
In the example above you can see that I used a site that shrinks longer link to shorter ones called TinyURL. TinyURL has some nice bonus features such as letting you create a preview link. It also lets you create a custom link where you can put any text you want after the “TinyURL.com” part.

Bit.ly
Bit.ly is another free site that will shorten your links. It also has features such as making custom links. The best part about this one is that you can sign up for an account. With an account you can keep a record of all the link that you have ever made on your account. It will also track how many clicks each link gets which can be useful for seeing if the link has received any hits over the past few days.

Hoot Suite
Hoot Suite is a site that will shorten your URLs. It will use a “ol” or “owl” extension. Hoot Suite also will track clicks on different links. The best part about Hoot Suite is that it is a Twitter Management site. You can manage different twitter account all from one Hoot Suite account for free. It has a built in tweeter and URL shorten-er. This makes getting those long URLs into your 140 character or less tweets very easy!


As you can see there are many different ways to get those extremely long link to websites down to only a few characters. The best part is that they are all free! So now hopefully all of you can start using more smaller and convenient links!




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