URL Shortener Shortlist
If you’re looking for ways to shorten long URLs to prevent them from breaking or working when you send them to your friends, you’ll find no dearth of options. The online applications are a dime a dozen.
If you’re having trouble choosing one, here is our top five.
- zi.ma — Our top spot was once reserved for Bit.ly, the first URL shortener to keep usage statistics. Now it’s Zi.ma. Zi.ma (no relation to the weirdly sweet and totally uncool alcoholic beverage) offers a cool web interface, analytics on the URLs you created, an thorough administrative interface and bulk URL creation tools. Not only does it provide hit statistics like Bit.ly, it also tracks the visitor’s referrer domain, referrer page, IP with link to geographical location and date. Downside? Login.
- Bit.ly — Bit.ly, as mentioned above, is a straightforward little tool, particularly useful for simple link tracking.
- is.gd — This one is pretty straightforward except for one simple thing: if you add a dash to the end of your URL, the URL will send you to a preview of where you’re going instead of directly to the page. This is useful in order to deflect bad URLs before your boss sees it.
- tinyurl.com — The granddaddy of them all, tiny.url is on the list simply because they started the whole darn thing. At least, they were the first to make the service popular.
- snurl.com — Allows you to snip many URLs at once, allows you to attach a private key for protection and has an API to create shortened URL’s in your browser.
Of course, if you’re going for the opposite effect, check out Freakinghugeurl.com.