There are many URL shortening services freely available on the web these days. These services will shorten your long and complicated URL into a very short URL which will act as an alias to your URL. This means that your regular URL and your shortened URL will both point to the same web page. This helps you to share the shortened URLs to your web pages in SMS messages on mobile phones, in tweets sent on Twitter (which has message size limit of 140 characters), and in email, etc. In an earlier article, Shorten long web addresses into small URLs with TinyURL, I had described one of the popular URL shortening service, namely TinyURL. In this article, I am describing another URL shortening service, bit.ly, which has now become even more popular than TinyURL due to its additional useful features. Moreover, bit.ly is now the de facto standard URL shortening service on Twitter which has further added to its popularity. It is absolutely free service.
For an illustration, consider the following URL:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=barack+obama+speech&revid=90953718&ei=aEq8SsyiEYaE6wOSt92RBQ &sa=X&oi=revisions_inline&resnum=0&ct=broad-revision&cd=7
It has 154 characters. Now, let us shorten it using bit.ly. Go to bit.ly, enter the above full URL in the text box with the title of “Enter your long link or file here” over there and then click Shorten button. And, you get the following shortened URL:
http://bit.ly/ckKgn
This shortened URL points to the same web page as the original long URL. Moreover, it has only about 19 characters. In fact, you can further shorten it by omitting the “http://” characters as a browser can still recognize the remaining text and take you to the correct web page; thus, the further shortened URL now contains only 12 characters and is as under:
bit.ly/ckKgn
Thus, you can easily notice that a long URL can be shortened by as much as up to 90% to 95% in size. This facilitates easy and convenient communication of long and complicated URLs.
bit.ly offers many other useful features, as explained below:
Browser Bookmarklet for bit.ly:
You can drag and drop the Browser Bookmarklet from the bit.ly home page to the tool bar or bookmarks bar in your browser. See the following image about this bookmarklet:
This bookmarklet will allow you to quickly shorten the URL of the web page currently displayed in your browser by a mere single click on the bookmarklet.
Browser Sidebar:
You can also drag and drop a Browser Sidebar from the bit.ly home page to the toolbar in your browser to shorten a URL and get traffic, conversations, and history details of shortened URLs. See the following image how this Sidebar will look like in your browser:
Real-time Link Tracking of your bit.ly links:
bit.ly allows you to track the performance of the bit.ly links to your web pages in real-time. You can sign up for a free account for this purpose.
Complete History of your bit.ly links:
In addition to the real-time tracking of your bit.ly links, you can also access the complete history of the bit.ly links to your web pages. This means that you will come to know how many times your bit.ly links have been clicked from within the web pages, emails, etc.
Details of the referring page:
Moreover, bit.ly can also tell you from which referring page this shortened URL to your web page was clicked. This can be useful to you for analyzing the traffic data for your website.
Preview Plugin for Firefox browser:
bit.ly provides a plugin for Mozilla Firefox browser using which you can preview the shortened URL to find out to which web page it leads to and it will also show you the web page title of the target page. This will be useful if someone has apprehensions about the shortened URL pointing to some harmful web address. See the image below for this preview feature:
Mirror copy of bit.ly linked pages:
As a bonus to using bit.ly shortened URL for your web page, it will create a mirror page for your web page which means an additional reserve copy of your page on the web in case your page gets deleted or exists no more; and your bit.ly shortened URL will still point to this mirror page.
Thus, it can easily be seen as to how bit.ly has become so popular these days. It is mainly because of its useful additional features some of which have been detailed above. You can make use of these and other features by creating a free account on bit.ly for shortening your web pages. I may clarify that you don’t need to create an account with bit.ly if you just want to shorten your URLs; you can do so on the fly for any number of your own web pages and/or even for other pages on the Internet without having any such account. You’ll need to open a free account with bit.ly only if you want to access its advanced features such as finding out history of your bit.ly links, tracking your bit.ly links in real-time or using the Browser Sidebar from bit.ly, etc.
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Have been using Bit.Ly but was not aware of these extra features. To tell the truth I had never visited bit.Ly site.