Thursday, February 9, 2012

What is TinyURL?

November 10, 2008 by Katie Skow  
Filed under EG

TinyURL has become very popular in the online Social Media world. When you send emails or blog, you don’t want to insert an entire website address (the URL) like this:

http://www.katieskow.com/2008/07/selling-your-product-on-amazon.

Why not? It’s long, completely unnecessary, and draws readers away from your well-crafted content. When blogging or sending an email, you insert the content using a hyperlink, which is easy to use and gives the content a cleaner look.

TinyURL comes in handy when the hyperlink option is not available. If you’re using Twitter, Facebook, chatting, leaving comments on a blog, or filling out an online form, it’s not always possible to insert a hyperlink. In some cases, there is a character limit (Twitter only allows 140) and inserting the large URL above already takes up 68 characters. If you still aren’t falling for my reasons, know that it’s very uncool these days to give someone a URL in its purest form. It communicates that you aren’t tech savvy. Even if you aren’t, you should pretend.

What is TinyURL? It makes long URL addresses much shorter. TinyURL turns the above 68 characters into 25 characters or less: http://tinyurl.com/6addbu.

Here is how to use TinyURL:

1. Visit the TinyURL website.
2. Copy the address you want to make tiny and paste it in the TinyURL box.
3. Finally, copy the new address from TinyURL and paste in Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Twitter It!