Ever wondered from where on earth the short and smart URLs coming from, specilly while reading tweets on Twitter like social networking websites? And yes, It does makes sence to shorten your URLs when there is a limit set on the total number of characters for a tweet.
Twitter allows you to add a website URL up to 40 characters without any problem. Say I wanted to tweet “Check this! DigitalPercept has shared a new article today http://www.digitalpercept.com/2009/12/avatar-an-audio-visual-treat-with-3d-technology-and-a-story-told-from-the-heart/” this will show an error stating the number of “extra” characters. That means you need to shorten the text. Here you cannot link text in your tweet, thus you just add the URL and Twitter creates the link for you.
There are plenty of websites helping you to shorten the link. What all these websites do for you is, storing the URL provided by you on there server and providing you the short URL pointing to your URL. Quite smart idea.
Few websites providing this service:
http://bit.ly
http://tinyurl.com
http://lizzer.com
Firefox Addon:
Few desktop applications providing this service:
Twhirl
twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.
Seesmic Desktop
TweetDeck alike features include the capability to monitor multiple feeds side-by-side in a similar fashion, create custom user lists, and post from multiple accounts while the application keeps track of which ones are which to keep duplicates at bay.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
This will allow you to convert those long URL’s into Short tiny URLs.
