URL Shortening Services

URL Shortening.Shorten your looooooooooooooooong URLs to short links !!!
URL shortening is easy to use and very nice for Internet conversations or sharing over instant messaging .Try this list of URL shortening services.

URL shortening is very common these days due to the publicity of micro blogging platforms like twitter.

URL shortening is very common these days due to the publicity of micro blogging platforms like twitter. URL shortening is easy to use and very nice for Internet conversations or sharing over instant messaging .Try this list of URL shortening services.

URL shortening became famous because of Twitter - a micro-blogging website. In twitter the maximum length of a post/status is 140 characters. So its not easy to share long html links , web links or URLs with your friends using twitter.

For example , I want to share a link of am image hosted on a Image hosting website like PhotoBucket or even on Google . Now the link of above is : https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6EPsgz2ADI6boenBLCPDds_sg-9VzAOw7fAUhuCjSJmUrn4s92OYkMyY5gLdkEEOct4FKwufqNoLTnOFpt-enjzXwkKv5Vdt61VpvjLKFnTcBmXPJUThxpvHrGi5a_fmoChXy2DFJL38/s320/turn-long-short.jpg ... link length is 100 characters. This is too big to share on twitter considering that I want to also write something about the image.

So I use a URL shortening service provider like : bit.ly  and now the above link is shortened to http://bit.ly/9NjvwE ... copy paste both these links and try it in your browse.

How URL Shortening works :
The logic is keeping a list of tables and using services like http re-direction and domain names.
It uses a namespace available say all 6 digit characters + number.

This means the namespace is like : a , aa ,aaa, aaaa, aaaaa, aaaaaa , a1, aa1, aa2,aa3 ...and so on.
If all combinations are considered for 26 characters only the number is like 26*26*26*26*26*26*26 = 308,915,776. If both capital and small letters are considered it will be 52*52*52*52*52*52 = 19,770,609,664 ... those are really massive numbers.

Every Shortened URL/Link is associated with a Key (link http://bit.ly/9NjvwE has a key 9NjvwE )
URL shortening is case sensitive. so a URL with same letters in capital and small letters is different .

Different Possiblities :

http://bit.ly/9NjvwE - links to above image
http://bit.ly/9Njvwe - links to a videos website ufc.neverseen.net

http://bit.ly/9NJVWE - links to a music article on Mashable.com

http://bit.ly/9nJVWe - links to something or someone on Facebook.com

And so on ...
Most URLs shortened by bit.ly service are 4-6 characters in length with a combination of numbers.

Loop Holes :
People use URL shortening to fool firewalls that block websites according to URL.
So if a corporate company blocks http://youtube.com , you can try to use : http://bit.ly/C57JB
Corporate environments need to be careful of short URLs.

One problem with short URLs is , looking at the URL you cannot guess where its going to take you.
If its http://youtube.com , you know it will take you to a website called YouTube ... but what if its http://bit.ly/C57JB ... confusion  , seems risky.
To solve this TinyUrl service came up with a preview link , which first shows you the full link for re-direction and then asks you do you want to proceed.

So for link :  http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jJrACiYnoEI/TLgEA-TgPKI/AAAAAAAABQ
E/xlDA8ue6lDQ/s320/turn-long-short.jpg 


Simple Tutorial :
----------------------
Short link is http://tinyurl.com/29x7kt6
Short preview link is http://preview.tinyurl.com/29x7kt6 (much safer with preview)
Preview :
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Preview of TinyURL.com/29x7kt6

This TinyURL redirects to:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jJrACiYnoEI/TLgEA-T
gPKI/AAAAAAAABQE/xlDA8ue6lDQ/s320/turn-long-s
hort.jpg
Proceed to this site.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another potential problem is , if the TinyUrl service goes down , all URLs linking to millions of websites will be blocked and hence the traffic to those websites is reduced.


List of URL Shortening Service Providers :

bit.ly
goo.gl
tinyurl
comyonet
phlpn.es
urlshorteningservicefortwitter
moourl
is.gd

sn.im
cli.gs
3.ly

Something I reserved it myself -  http://tinyurl.com/wikiya

1 comments:

Post a Comment