What is TinyURL? Why Should I Use it?

Have you ever received an e-mail with a long link to a website? Maybe the link was pretty long, something like this example that take you to the UEN Faculty Lounge: http://www.uen.org/development/pdevel.do;jsessionid=48C639F52E99275B39DDB6D5F07EBF72

That's pretty unwiedly looking, isn't it? Enter one of my favorite websites, TinyURL.com. At TinyURL you can paste a long url into the box provided..and voilá, Tiny URL will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires. Here is the Tiny URL that take your to the same page as above, the UEN FAculty Lounge: http://tinyurl.com/3xvgp6

Something even cooler than using the TinyURL website each time you want to create a TinyURL is the Firefox TinyURL addon.

When you have the TinyURL addon installed on your computer, you can simply right click on a link and choose to create a TinyURL for the link or even the page! Take a look at the screen shot to see what I mean.

OK, so how can you get that addon? Go to the Firefox (aka Mozilla) home page. Look for the link to Firefox addons. Search for TinyURL (created by by Jeremy Gillick) and install it onto your computer.

When you restart Firefox, you will have the functionality to create tinyURL's by right clicking on a link. There are many more Firefox addons, extensions, and themes.

I hope you will find TinyURL creator a useful tool for creating tinyURL's from those longer one we all find a bit unwieldy.