I just had a wonderfully typical experience with TinyURL and thought I should share it in case you weren’t familiar with this fabulous site. The site’s premise states in the title “shorten that long URL to a Tiny URL”. Makes sense, right? But why would you use it?
I was sending some information via email and this is what the link I wanted to send looked like:
http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=001aqj1QInodGQ-eJejmB_g_0C6xwRDi2t_-yrQUrSSpWACR1UbLXtK33eQnCxKz7xPVZJjwUAqebEs5rUS-jG9sVhqXmqtv0EUMR8aPkBba8TnnOn49sj6UkE824lcnG5WXB3orv16l6ON-s0Qy9GoH7j5vQbGluQVZYyE7O6FTJMFX0Q7JKVIdKhwDGo4yzYDYwAzsra8C4cfLJELvkwDwgABWSoFj4xzIHoBygMWBYa5dGYJJUuzylGF2jAtNA9KERN9dzkAm9mQ-T_dhUYRpBaCj6B8XmRWciRQXMyokIyMhTp2-RMQPzLaxH1azZGJ2t_I-iA_dBeDkHa9HhL9Jwkb85YpNsY8
If you have had any experience with sending links via email, you know that this very long link is going to break in different places depending on how the email is read. And you also know that the automatic hyperlink that will be generated will most likely not include the entire URL. So, I popped it into TinyURL and ended up with:
http://tinyurl.com/6lrkoy
Simple, easy and it won’t break. From 400 characters down to 25.
Use of TinyURL is especially helpful when using technology where the number of characters count like SMS (text messages), Facebook status or Twitter.