Tag: URLSHORTENER

Magnet URIs, which are a way of downloading torrents without actually downloading a .torrent file, are a fantastic idea, but a bit... long-winded. They're regularly over 200 characters long, making them too long to share with Twitter. Email clients can break them by inserting line breaks, and most annoyingly, very few IM clients make magnet links 'clickable.' Mgnet.me, as you can tell from ...

Rejoice ye programmers! You can now access Google's URL shortener via a simple API. It can either be accessed in a brute-force "gimme a short link now" way; or you can make authenticated requests, which puts shortened URLs into your Goo.gl dashboard, allowing clickthroughs to be analyzed. In the announcement, Google also points to Royal Pingdom's research into the fastest and most reliable URL ...

Goo.gl, Google's URL shortener, has finally been given a website -- once there, you can shorten links and view real-time analytics of every short link you've ever created. The site itself is plain, like most of Google's offerings, but the real-time analytics page is nothing short of fantastic. You can break traffic down by hours, days, weeks, months and all time, and see the total number of ...

Twitter is famous for its quick 140-character bursts of information, but the new target number might be 120 characters, plus links. In a new post on the official Twitter blog, Twitter's Sean Garrett outlines the company's new philosophy that links shouldn't count against the character limit. To make that happen, Twitter's launching its own URL shortener, t.co, that will automatically be applied to ...

In response to a bunch of recent phishing scams on Twitter -- all of which took advantage of Direct Messages and shortened URLs -- Twitter has decided to launch its own URL shortener to boost security. The new shortener is called twt.tl -- little? Twittle? I think I get it! -- and it will allow Twitter to find malicious links as they're shortened, rather than waiting until they've been direct ...

There are dozens of URL shortener available on the web like tr.im, bit.ly, and goo.gl, to name just a few. They all take long URLs and squeeze them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. It's about using the smallest space possible: On Twitter or instant message status even a 60 character long URL can be too long. For example the URL ...

We've written before on Download Squad about Bit.ly's plans to offer a premium service, including custom URL shorteners like the ones they provide for sites like The New York Times. Well, Bit.ly Pro has entered a public beta phase now, and you don't have to be the New York Times to get your own free, custom shortURL. All you have to do is sign up for a Bit.ly account and find a way to register ...

The super-simply blog platform Posterous has just released a new feature on its post.ly domain, which was previously used only as a URL shortener. For those that are not familiar, Posterous is a blogging platform that makes posting dead simple. You just send an email to post@posterous.com, and if you don't already have a blog there one is created for you. Subsequent emails are treated as new ...

Hot on the heels of both Goo.gl and Fb.me, there's now a Youtu.be! Its sole purpose: shorter YouTube links. There isn't really a lot more to this one, other than a brief explanation of how they work: Take the 'key' from the end of a YouTube video URL -- The key, in the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 would be 'oHg5SJYRHA0' Stick it on the end of YouTu.be -- and... voila! ...

Bit.ly is the reigning champion of URL shorteners, largely thanks to its position as the default shortURL provider for Twitter. Twitter isn't the only bigtime site that will be relying on Bit.ly now, though. A new Pro version of the service, currently in beta, provides custom URL shorteners for web publishers, and it's starting with The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and ...

Still concerned about whether or not your favorite URL shortening service is going to go belly-up and leave you with a pile of broken links? Hedge your bets with MURLS. The tiny, portable application is plugged in to 28 different services including popular ones like bit.ly, tr.im, is.gd, and tinyurl. Each shortener is selectable in the MURLS options screen, so you can create as few or as many ...

URL shorteners, while convenient, are bad for the web. They hide the true destination that they are pointing to, giving bad guys yet another tool in their arsenal, while conditioning web users to blindly trust the links they are clicking on. Further, as the debacle with tr.im showed us, URL shortening services aren't necessarily permanent. It's no coincidence that the rise in popularity of URL ...

Bit.ly dominates the URL shortener market due to its position as the default URL shortener on Twitter, but its features also measure up well against competitors. One area where Bit.ly loses out, though, is in the length of its base URL. Bit.ly is one more character than tr.im or ow.ly and two more than u.nu. Bit.ly is addressing that (relatively small) weakness by introducing j.mp, which is just ...

With all the drama around brand-name URL shorteners, a lot of blogs have advised people to skip the big guys and create their own. Easier said than done, though, right? Well, maybe not: Lessn, a service from brilliant designer Shaun Inman (who also developed the Fever feed reader), makes getting a personal shortURL as simple as possible. All you need is some server space where you can throw up ...

URL-shortening services are plentiful these days, but they're not all equal. There are a few key features we're looking for in our ideal URL-shrinker. We want a bookmarklet, to avoid needless copy-pasting. We want a short base URL for easy Twittering. There's also the ability to custom-name your URLs, so you can tell them apart and they make sense to the people you're sending to. Bit.ly has all of ...