making URLs simple
Have a URL that you want to send to a friend, but it’s crazy long? Try tinyurl — just paste your ugly url into the box, and hit the button. Presto, you get a nice little url instead. That’s nice because:
- it’s a lot easier to say the tiny url over the phone
- the tiny url won’t get broken in email (even gmail has this problem)
- the long urls get separated into several lines, and the link only includes the first line.
For example, I have a link that shows what a great sense of humor the google maps folks have, but it looks like this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=boston,+ma+to+London,
+UK&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=35.494074,82.265625&layer=
&ie=UTF8&z=4&ll=46.920255,-34.628906&spn=
30.649939,82.265625&om=1
Update (7/29/2007) : This link used to give some comical directions for driving across the ocean, but it looks like they lost their sense of humor on this one.)
When I drop it into tinyurl, it turns into this:
There are other websites that do what tinyurl.com does, but there is only one that I remember when I am trying to make a tiny url.
As a bonus, here’s an article about the success of Apple retail stores: