My New URL Shortener

posted on March 8, 2009

After waiting a little, I figured that it’s time to write about one of my websites. I finished this one a few weeks ago (give or take), but it’s always looking for some tweaking.

Tini.us – A URL Shortener

My website is a URL shortener. You can find it at http://tini.us/. It’s not just a URL shortener, though. I’ll get into that later.

For those who don’t know what a URL shortener is, it’s fairly simple. Let’s pretend that you have a URL that’s extremely long.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=england&sll=42.091646,-72.455971&sspn=0.010509,0.021865&g=austrailia+oceania&ie=UTF8&ll=35.047987,11.403809&spn=0.005648,0.010933&z=17&iwloc=addr

Imagine trying to send that to someone on Facebook, IM, Twitter, etc. It wouldn’t even fit in a post! There has to be a better way. Actually, there is a better way. I’m writing this post about it.

http://tini.us/v/6f

Ah, much, much better. Using tini.us, we have changed the 266 character URL into a 19 character URL. Pretty cool, huh?

That’s not all

There are many services that do what I explained above. My URL shortener is no where near the first and it definitely won’t be the last. I did my best to make it a little difference, though.

In addition to a normal tini, which is just a short URL, you can create a super tini. A super tini allows users to post reviews about the URL that you shortened. This won’t work in some situations, but in others, it’s perfect.

The main purpose is if you are posting a link in multiple places. When a review is posted, it tries to figure out where the user is coming from, and then displays that. It’s usually right.

For example, if a user clicks on your link on Twitter, it will say ‘from twitter.com’. If a user clicks on your link on Facebook, it will say ‘from facebook.com’. That way, you can post your link in many places and still recieve feedback. Check it out?

You can find tini.us at http://tini.us/. If you like it, please share it with your friends. If you don’t, you can tell me why here! Please leave a comment with your suggestions, thoughts, rants, etc.