The Basics of URL Shorteners

In modern websites that use content publishing systems, URLs have become quite long.  Long URLs are hard to pass along. In emails, they can make line breaks where you don’t want them.  Links look horribly long on webpages and in social media, they are just too long to fit within the allowed number of characters.

Thankfully there are a number of free services that help with this. URL shorteners basically use a HTTP redirect to the desired page. The idea of shortening URLs dates back to 2001, with the TinyURL as the first service launched in 2002.  Twitter even used TinyURL initially, although it has switched to bit.ly

Easy, free, no login URL shorteners:

 TinyURL   (http://www.tinyurl.com)

 bit.ly  (http://www.bit.ly)

 URL shortners with more features, but require login:

 Cligs (http://www.cli.gs)

 budurl (http://budurl.com)