You have no doubt started to see links to websites that look quite odd recently, some examples:

• http://bit.ly/pZixT
• http://tr.im/tYd7

Most recently the use of twitter has started to highlight these URL shortening services due to the fact that twitter only allows 140 characters in posts.  So with 140 characters people needed ways to take a long website address and compress it down into something much much shorter.

The solution was some specific websites set up just for that purpose, and now there are dozens if not hundreds of these services. So instead of sending a link to something that looks like this:

http://www.jaymccormack.com/index.php/2009/07/25/a-cheat-sheet-for-twitter/

You can instead send this:

http://bit.ly/pZixT

Creating your own short urls

You’ll first need to pick one of the many services available that offer this, my preference is a site called bit.ly.  They offer services just like many other services however it’s a fairly popular service which also means that they integrated into many different tools and websites to make it really easy to use.  So feel free to do some research but if you just want to get started then bit.ly is the one to use.

The next step is to actually use the service.  There are primarily two ways:

1. Manually by copying and pasting.  Find the website address you want to shorten, copy it onto your clipboard then goto to bit.ly and paste the website address into the box on the home page.  Click on ‘Shorten’ and then you will be given the short URL to use.  The beauty of this is that you don’t need to register to use the service and it’s free.
2. Integrated.  If you are a Firefox user then you can add an Add-on to firefox to make using bit.ly really easy.  Install the add-on Shareaholic from this page.  Once installed you can then turn on the bit.ly service in the configuration.  To create a short URL all you need to do is click on the Shareaholic icon in your Firefox address bar and choose bit.ly.  Within moments you’ll have a short URL ready for sharing.