Quick post. I’m seeing more long URLs shorted with the service is.gd. I, like most people, use tinyurl.com to shorten URLs. It’s great. But if you’re posting a URL on Twitter, those extra few characters in a TinyURL eat into your 140-character limit.
is.gd goes even further. Here’s an example comparing the two services:
Blog post: FriendFeed RSS Is a Fantastic Discovery Tool
Full URL: http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/friendfeed-rss-is-a-fantastic-discovery-tool/
- 82 characters
TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/6qhk4n
- 25 characters
is.gd: http://is.gd/7oc
- 16 characters
So there’s a pick-up of 9 characters via is.gd. Can be quite valuable on Twitter, eh?
It doesn’t have a toolbar button, which makes converting URLs really easy with TinyURL. That’d be a nice addition.`
For a nice read on several different URL shorteners, check out Carlo Maglinao’s post on TechBays.
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See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22New+Kid+on+the+Shortened+URL+Block%3A+is.gd%22&public=1
Hutch, that’s a smart find. An even shorter url.
But the services I use to tweet, TwitThis and Mahalo Follow, both use tinyurl. =(
Carlo
Comment by Carlo Maglinao — April 19, 2008 @ 8:14 am
[...] BHC3 demonstrates via an example in his blog [...]
Pingback by Twitter Ecosystem: Short URLs « Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings — April 19, 2008 @ 11:33 pm
[...] Bit.ly Gets Better with New Data…Are You Using It Yet? Filed under: geek — Tags: bit.ly, is.gd, open calais, readwriteweb, tinyurl — Hutch Carpenter @ 5:25 am Lately, I’ve been using bit.ly for shortening the URLs I tweet, on the advice of Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb. I started using it instead of is.gd, which had been my previous favorite. [...]
Pingback by Bit.ly Gets Better with New Data…Are You Using It Yet? « I’m Not Actually a Geek — November 3, 2008 @ 5:25 am