Twitter Tips: URL Shorteners Do More Than Save Space

Since Twitter limits messages to 140 characters, users have quickly come to depend on "URL shorteners." These free services take the long URLs for links that we find on the Web and shrink them to a manageable, eye-friendly size. Some shortening tools even allow you track the performance (i.e. number of clicks) that a URL receives from Twitter and other social networking services. But all shorteners aren't alike; as I'll show you, some offer more advanced features.

Even if you don't use URL shorteners yet, you've no doubt seen them on Twitter. For instance, last week, the link to my explanation of the new Google Wave app appeared like this on CIO.com:

http://www.cio.com/article/493707/Google_Wave_A_New_Kind_of_Mega_Application

Using bit.ly, a popular URL shortening service, I posted the story to Twitter using this URL:
http://bit.ly/gXwbf

Ideally, the shorter URL made it easier for the people who follow me on Twitter to share the link with their followers. The shorter URL also gives people more character space to make a comment about the link in their tweets, explaining what they liked or disliked (it happens!) about the review. Like many URL shorteners, bit.ly allows me to track how many people on Twitter clicked on the link and "retweeted" (shared) it with their followers, which is also helpful.

But URL shorteners have some drawbacks, too. For one, they are becoming weapons for spam attacks, because shortened URLs appear very generic. A typical shortened URL contains the address of the URL shortening service, followed by a few random characters.

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