You must have seen those shortened, and cryptic, web addresses – particularly in Tweets?

Essentially URL shortening is a technique that condenses a long URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a web addresses, to a short collection of odd characters. The tools that do the shortening are becoming very popular thanks to sites like Twitter, where every character counts.

There are good reasons to use URL shortening:

• Copying, or remembering a very long URL, hundreds of characters long, isn’t easy
• Twitter only allows you 140 characters – so long URLs are out!

But one service, Bit.ly has pulled ahead of the others.

Twitter recently changed its default link shortener from TinyURL to Bit.ly.  However, Bit.ly recently raised $2 million in venture financing allegedly from the same VC-firm that Twitter received $100 million from in September.

Do have a look at the Bit.ly site.  You can shorten long links directly, or better still if you create an account, use it as addon in your browser, and better still access the complete history of your bit.ly links.  Analytics!  Essential for those metrics for your Social Media Marketing strategy …

But there is a risk – a shortened URL can be sometime used for pranks, for phishing (attempting to acquire passwords and credit card details by masquerading), or for affiliate marketing (using one website to drive traffic to another).  As ever, with anything on the internet, take care …