I Love TinyURL.com
I love Tiny URL – it’s great for taking hellaciously long URLs and making them (you guessed it, tiny). When would you use that?
When you’re sending a web page from a site to someone else via email, for example. How many times have you done that and they’ve said, “I can’t see the page!” Because it’s so long it ‘wraps’ in your email and consequently loses the entire link.
For example, you’ve found a link to Barak Obama’s book on Amazon that you want to show someone else. Amazon has a huge database of information and throws together information on the fly. This often results in URLs that are long strings of numbers, and you can’t ever be sure it’ll arrive at your friend’s email destination as a clickable link:
Tiny URL will transform this 99 character URL:
http://www.amazon.com/Dreams-My-Father-Story-Inheritance/dp/1400082773/ref=xarw/103-9122416-2231013
To this: http://tinyurl.com/246lmh
Brilliant! And it’s free!
Good points, and I’m glad you limited the use to email… since tiny url negates any SEO value if you use it on your site instead of the actual (sometimes brutally long url’s)
Great point, Tamera. And thanks for the clarification.
Cheers!