PickAdvice

Twitter has a limit on the amount of text that can be tweeted. Many blogs doesn’t allow the comments to contain lengthy url. How can we overcome this limitation. The solution is to use a URL shortening  service. URL shortening services, gives you a short alias url for your lengthy URL. This short url is an alias and so it resolves to the original url when it is clicked.

Here is my top list of url shortening services.

Goo.gl  is a url shortening service from Google and is my top one. It is easy to use, doesn’t need sign-in ( but if you sign-in you can maintain a history of all your short url’s) and provides a good report showing the no of clicks for the day, week, month and all time. This report also shows the region of access, the browser, referrers and the platform.

For instance goo.gl/IAFWd  is the shortened url for my post’s original url http://pickadvice.com/positioning-html-elements-using-css-styles-only-guide-youll-ever-need/. My original URL of 93 characters is reduced to an URL of only 13 characters. Saving is 80 characters. This shortened URL is twitter friendly.

Bitly is a good URL / link shortening service and is in my top two. Bitly is simple to use and it also doesn’t need sign-in. But logging-in gives more options to you. You can sign-in with your Facebook or twitter account or create a new account in bitly.  For the logged in user, bitly offers more services than just a shortened URL.

Bitmarks : These are better bookmarks or the shortened URLs you created using bitly. You can group bit marks into various bundles and give a name to it. Bundles are just a grouping of  bitmarks. There is no restriction on the number of bundles you can create. You can group interesting URLs into a bundle and share it with your friends. If you don’t want them on your public profile, just mark them as private. Bitly’s bundle is like a pin in pinterest.

Bitly also offers stats on the URLs. But this stat is not as exhaustive as the one provided by Goo.gl.

Tiny URL  is yet another URL shortening service available and it works. But the user interface is not as good as Goo.gl or Bitly and it doesn’t offer any stats on the URL. Again the URL created is not as short as the one created by Goo.gl or bitly.

Goo.gl provides rich click stream analysis on the shortened URLs and it provides the best short URL. Goo.gl is my Top Tool !

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About prem

Google: +Prem I am a technology enthusiast interested in electronics, internet and computer science. I am passionate about mobile phones, science and advanced technological innovations. I have vast experience in electronics and computer science. Join me on Google+ I dream of a future that relies on clean energy, a future that is pollution free , a future where technology is put to the benefit of the human kind all over the world.

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