URL shortening services provides short alias names to redirect lengthy URLs. For instance the lengthy URL http://www.techdreams.org/freewares/deleted-files-accidentally-here-are-4-best-free-tools-to-recover-them/ can be reduced to http://tinyurl.com/666x3d. Pretty clean and easy to remember right?
I regularly use URL shortening services when I need to SMS/Text an URL to someone. Also short URLs are easy to remember, write down or pass around in email signatures.
There are dozens of URL shortening services. But here are two services that are unique and quite popular in this arena
Tiny URL is the most popular URL shortening service available today. Twitter uses this service to automatically shorten the URLs exchanged by it users. The easy to remember domain name made it very popular.
Even though users cannot control output of the shortened URL, the service reduces URLs to 6 characters hash and copies it output automatically to clipboard. With the help of TinyURL bookmark you can shorten URLs in a single click
SnipURL is another excellent URL shortening service that is giving tough competition to TinyURL. Apart from shortening the URLs, registered users get access to web 2.0 features like sharing SnipURLs, RSS Feeds of latest snips, password protecting the SnipURLs and click through statistics.
These are the two services that I like. But what do you think? Go ahead and let us know through comments if you have found any other service interesting.
There’s another upcoming service called “Lin.cr”
http://riteshsapra.net/wp/2008/05/20/lincr-that-url-please/