Create Short Tiny Small Urls and Links

If you have a very long url and want to quote a short link somewhere or add your link to the limited signature on forums, what do you do? Make a short url.

Why make urls tiny, small or short?
1. Hide the original url. This makes it possible to mask affiliate links or the main url for whatever reason.
2. Get a neat short url, easy to remember and quote.
3. Make a smaller URL that will work for any page on your site.
4. Long urls tend to break into parts, or distort pages in forums and blog comments. Small urls fix this.
5. Some forms like signatures in forums allow limited characters, so a tiny url would fit there.

So the answer is small urls free services like Tinyurl. The best way is to drag a bookmarklet to the browser toolbar and whenever you want to create a short url, just click it and get the tinyurl (or use their form). And quote this anywhere to reach that page. Simple and fast.

Shorl.com is another such service, it gives a direct url to the statistics in addition to the ‘shorlify’ url which is password protected.

Snipurl has some more advanced features if you like going beyond the simple short url. It allows you to create the unique short name which follows if you do not like the random text they generate. You can also create password protected urls for privacy purposes. You can edit them, track them and even make multiple snipurls in one powerful go.

This is one of my popular posts which I quote often with a long url.
http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.html

See what TinyUrl created
http://tinyurl.com/65a3b

And this is what Shorl created
http://shorl.com/jestatadylase

SnipUrl got me this
http://snipurl.com/dojt

Possibly there are more which you know of!