Twitter makes every character count, and when you’re sharing a link, the cardinal rule is to leave at least 20 characters for others to be able to comfortably retweet. URL shorteners have been around for a while, the more traditional of them being TinyURL. But with seven characters already, not to mention the http:// and .com, and a TinyURL isn’t really all that tiny.
Enter tr.im, comfortably short, but unlike is.gd, which is also short, tr.im came with a very seductive extra: the ability to help you track your click-throughs. Sadly, after some attempts to monetize or sell, tr.im has bitten the dust.
So what equally short shorteners are left and what can they do?
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bit.ly
URLs are shortened to: http://bit.ly/
Tracks link stats: yes
Allows for shortening URLs that aren
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cli.gs
URLs are shortened to: http://cli.gs/
Tracks link stats: yes
Allows for shortening URLs that aren’t live: yes
Lets you customize your short URLs: yes
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ow.ly
URLs are shortened to: http://ow.ly/
Tracks link stats: only if you use hootsuite
Lets you customize your short URLs: no
And currently in private beta is LA tech’s own grf.me, a URL shortener that’s part of Brooks Bayne’s larger social mapping effort, The Graph:
What do you use and why do you like it?
