Back in June, under the post shorter-uris-for-business-apps.html I had illustrated how to shorten aesthetically unpleasant and difficult to remember long urls. Recently, I came across some emails from my alumni that had cryptic domain names and context paths (something like http://bit.ly/wX48sl) . Often encountering such shorter and spam kind of URL's all across the web world, I was curious to explore further.
It turned out these shorter versions are staged via url shortening service providers who registers and associates your longer version with some randomly generated alphanumeric token. When you distribute your urls, it will basically carry the service provider's domain along with this token; when users cilick on this shortened version, their browser is redirected to the longer version of the page. Personally, I do not like such URL's as they are often source of spams and phising; you need to trust the person sending the link as you cannot trust the link.
There are many players in this field like bit.ly, tr.im, cli.gs, etc., and such URL shortening is more popular with twitters. This link provides good comparision of features among all the players and feature set (http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204)
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