Shockingly simple URL shortening
URL shortening is something that's been at the back of my mind since listening to SitePoint Podcast #24 which discussed the near closure of tr.im.
Why are short URLs required? Twitter. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, and URLs often seem recklessly long in this context. Of course, Twitter could simply allow us to apply short, meaningful labels to our links as we've been doing in HTML for years. Instead, each time one includes a link in a tweet one must either:
- spend a large number of characters on the full URL; or
- use a short URL generated by a service such as bit.ly