The growth of social media content sharing on the web has seen an explosion in the use of URL shortening services. The restricted message length on Twitter in particular means every character is precious. The premise of these services is that they replace having to use a long URL like http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2010/jan/25/news-linked-data-summit with a much shorter one like http://bit.ly/8v6FFs. When the bit.ly servers see the code '8v6FFs', they know to redirect the user to the original article.
URL shorteners have been around on the web for the best part a decade, with the original, tinyurl.com, launching back in 2002. Compared to more recently launched services, tinyurl.com looks positively giant. Although not quite as long as the spoof site http://reallyreallyreallylonguniformresourcelocatorredirection.com/ which performs the same type of service, but with the principle reversed so that it makes really long and unhelpful URLs instead. The very shortest service around today is TO./ which makes clever use of the Tonga top-level country domain to produce URLs like http://to./5gnx.
Most services allow several ways to shorten a URL. One way is to visit the home page of the service you want to use, and put in the full length URL that you want to shorten. The drawback with this method is that it interrupts your web browsing experience, and involves leaving the page you were trying to share.
For that reason most services offer tools like a 'bookmarklet' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet). This is a link that you drag to the bookmarks toolbar in your browser. When you want to share a shortened URL, clicking that button in your browser opens the URL shortening service, pre-populated with the details of the page you were on. This can make the sharing of content almost frictionless. This type of bookmarklet can also work on some mobile browsers, allowing you to share web content that you have been browsing on your smartphone easily.
Not all URL shorteners are born equal - and I don't just mean that is.gd has an advantage over bit.ly by being one letter shorter, or that j.mp goes one better than that. The different services offer different features.
One of bit.ly's strengths, for example, is the metrics it provides. Once you are registered on the service and have linked your Twitter account to bit.ly, you get an overview page showing the links you have shortened. As well as providing a useful overview, the number of times people have clicked on your shortened version of the link is shown, alongside the total number of clicks there have been to that item. That allows you to see at a glance whether you are sharing unique content, and how popular your sharing efforts are.
Many services also give you the option to customise the short URL. Instead of ending up with a computer readable mish-mash of characters like http://bit.ly/1TCzWt which is hard to read or remember, you can change it to say something that is easier for people to keep in mind, like http://bit.ly/rssfumsi for the 'RSS feeds - Managing the mechanism' article on FUMSI. Of course, these short custom readable URLs are popular, and you may find that your first choice is already taken on a service. You'll need to get creative like people do when they find their choice of username or nickname is taken. And don't forget, there is no point using a short URL service if you are going to customise it to read http://bit.ly/areallylonglonglonglongwayoflinkingtofumsi.
URL shorteners are not just for use on Twitter though. They can be very helpful when giving presentations. People can struggle to take down web addresses in their notes, particularly if the URL is long and clumsy. However, a shortened URL placed on a PowerPoint slide can be a lot easier to jot down.
One note of caution though. If you get one or two characters wrong in a human readable or guessable URL, you can usually try some reasonable alternatives. If you note down the randomly generated short URL mix of letters wrong, you've got no hope of finding the right page. For that reason I recommend two things. Firstly, use the customising features of a service like bit.ly to produce a human readable short URL like the http://bit.ly/rssfumsi address I mentioned earlier. Secondly, always make a list of the links in your presentation and make that available to the audience on the Internet or your intranet as appropriate
As well as in presentations, shortened URLs can be very useful in print publications. If you are referring to lengthy URLs which feature lots of question marks or tildes, then printing a shortened version makes it more likely that your readers will actually attempt to visit the website, and even more likely that they can succeed. Not only can this help the readability and usability of articles, it also can have a commercial benefit. If your publication contains links to places where people can buy books or products, you could use shortened URL links that include affiliate codes, allowing you to generate revenue when your readers purchase items.
URL shortening services are not without issues - not least of which is permanence. We often forget that when people first started blogging, the 'perma' bit of permalink stood for permanent, and URL shorteners add an extra layer of redirection and complication onto the world wide web addressing system. There is no guarantee that any of these services will be around in 5 years time or, given the sometimes volatile nature of Internet start-ups, 5 months time. If one of the major URL redirection services were to be switched off and disappear, they would leave behind a swathe of broken links across the web.
Another issue that some people have with the services is that they mask the destination URL. If you see a sensational news headline, and the URL is from one of the reliable industry news source, you might be much more inclined to investigate further than if the URL was from a blog you've never heard of. When all links look the same, it is harder to make that judgement up front. The Internet phenomena of 'Rickrolling' - tricking someone into playing a video by Rick Astley - often relies on using a shortened version of the URL to hide the destination. However, there is a concern that the trick could be much worse than an unexpected dose of 80s pop, and that people could use these services maliciously to redirect people to malware or phishing attempts.
Some publications have tried to get around that problem by introducing their own short URLs. If you see a link to nyti.ms, you know straightaway that it is going to the New York Times, and a gu.com address always leads to The Guardian. Providing your own URL shortening service can also be done using the API of some of the providers - FUMSI contributor Malcolm Coles uses http://mcol.es for example. The advantage for publishers in running their own service is that encouraging people to use the same pre-determined short link for their content allows for easier tracking of traffic, and some think that the provision of the shortened form encourages more people to share content.
Without doubt the concept hit upon by tinyurl.com in 2002 has some advantages and disadvantages - but URL shorteners are likely to be a fixture of the Internet landscape that will be with us for some time to come.
Martin Belam is Contributing Editor for the Share section of FUMSI, and Information Architect at Guardian News & Media. One of the projects he has recently worked on was making shorter URLs for guardian.co.uk content available via the gu.com address when users click the 'Tweet this' button on the website's article pages. Martin regularly blogs about information architecture, journalism and digital media at http://www.currybet.net or http://bit.ly/mbelam
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
![[Reuse options]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.png){kind=small}
The growth of social media content sharing on the web has seen an explosion in the use of URL shortening services. The restricted message length on Twitter in particular means every character is precious. The premise of these services is that they replace having to use a long URL like 
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
