I recently came across a new method for sharing really long URL’s which I think is pretty slick. In the past I have used TinyURL, but I am a convert to urlTea. At the end of the day there is almost nothing different between these two services. Both of them allow you to feed them a url of any length, and get a nice short easy to type url in return. When people use the short url, the service redirects them to the original URL that was created. Seems simple enough.
What I like about urlTea though, is that you can append a ? at the end of any url, and include any text after the ? as a descriptor for the link. The link still brings people to the correct location, but the link becomes more useful. I have been using the online presence application Jaiku over the past week or so (switched from Twitter), and the urlTea urls come in handy. I just posted one this morning, and you can see that the url and the description just sort of flow together into a nice single posting. Interestingly, urlTea was created to meet the needs of people on Twitter that “tweeted” about their frustration with TinyURL.
urlTea also has a nice feature where they automatically copy the shortened url to the clipboard for faster usage. Pretty cool little service all told. They have some things in the pipeline for enhancements, I think the most interesting could be the stats page where you can see how many times a link was used. They have the following to-dos listed on their page:
TODO:
- Bookmarklet for creating a urlTea to the site you’re currently on
- Making a Jabber bot that when IM’d a URL, will reply with a “urlTea” URL, saving the user from having to create it elsewhere.
- Auto-creating more semantic “urlTea” URLs, which further saves the user from guessing what the shorter link goes to.
- preview.urltea.com (and p.urltea.com for brevity) to display a link to the destination, rather than just redirect
- Cookie options to force preview mode and to disable automatic copy to clipboard
- stats.urltea.com (and s.urltea.com for brevity) to show some simple statistics on a urltea url.
- random.urltea.com (and r.urltea.com for brevity) to pick a random url from the urltea database. Also preview.random and pr.
- Go Open Source!
- Break even!
Check them out if you have not already, especially if you need a service of this type.
Comments (2)
“I think the most interesting could be the stats page where you can see how many times a link was used”
Perhaps a short url service like http://zxc.fi would do it?
But urlTea is indeed a good one.
Check out http://traceurl.com
There you can choose the prefix of the generated URL. Thus the short URLs don’t look that cryptic. On top of that you can monitor accesses to the URL, meaning count accesses and see where the visitors come from.