url shortners

[WigWam]

what url shortner do you use and why do you like using them (features)

e.g. bit.ly, owl.ly, tinyurl.com etc

Cheers + rep for answers

WigWam

 

[Muller2]

I use tinyurl.com as it has a nice api that I have used to generate my urls automatically for me in my programs.

 

[mat]

tinyurl.com

 

[Pred]

urls.mobi

 

[WigWam]

tinyurl.com

lol mat, fast edit

 

[Systreg]

I honestly don't like url shorteners, I've only very rarely used tinyurl where I wanted to post a news link or something that had about a million characters in the url, and I'm not in the habit of clicking them unless the person posting it is known to me, and even then I still don't like them much, I prefer to know what end result url I'm clicking, which you can't tell with shorteners.

 

[mat]

lol mat, fast edit

shhhhhhh

 

[doodlebug]

I honestly don't like url shorteners, I've only very rarely used tinyurl where I wanted to post a news link or something that had about a million characters in the url, and I'm not in the habit of clicking them unless the person posting it is known to me, and even then I still don't like them much, I prefer to know what end result url I'm clicking, which you can't tell with shorteners.

So it's not only me who gets wary of these links, I always check the URL properties first

 

[Systreg]

So it's not only me who gets wary of these links, I always check the URL properties first

Every link I click, I always make sure it's the same url in the status bar before clicking them, you can't be too careful.

 

[wb]

If you receive a Tiny URL link (e.g. tinyurl.com/name), add the subdomain 'preview' (e.g. preview.tinyurl.com/name) to it, hit enter and it will tell you where it goes

 

[crabfoot]

scuse me but my thinkin head is in the wash -

I see the sense of using these URL shorteners for stupid long URLs - but when I've done a bit of Mechanical Turk work, some requesters insist that URLs you find for them are shortened before you submit them. And they are not all that long, either.

Now what sort of camouflage value does that have? Is this a way around putting paid links on their sites to avoid marking them as "no follow" for the spiders, or is it even more devious ...

I don't know about these things myself, being completely innocent and naive, and frankly a bit thick as my wife would say ...

 

[aZooZa]

~~ moo.mu ~~

 

[WigWam]

~~ moo.mu ~~

Nice, Do you own that one?

WigWam

 

[crabfoot]

nah, he's justified and ancient, and comes from moo moo land ...

 

[illtemper]

I mostly use bit.ly and is.gd

 

[Whois-Search]

I like www.url.co.uk