Orangeinks

Lnk.By: Give Meaning to Short URLs

Lnk.By is a new URL shortening service that promises to give URL shrinking a whole new meaning, literally. This is what a link shrinking service should be like. The short link that Lnk.By creates describes the content found inside. A lot of people are hesitant to click on short URLs because they are afraid of what they’ll find on the other side. Lnk.By can be used to create a more transparent description of what’s inside the shrunken URL.

If you’re going to forward link which contains music, you can easily provide a short URL description saying that what’s on the other side of the link contains music by using the lstn.in URL. The watch.it URL can be used for shortening long video URLs, see.it for photos and read.im for text content.

Even with the link description, the service is not fully protected from people who hide mischievous URLs behind link shorteners. If they can detect pages that doesn’t match the link used to shorten it, which would be very cool, they can reduce the usage of misleading content behind shortened URLs.

Additional Info

This service was created in one weekend. This site will be adding new features regularly, and we’ll also be updating our lists of domains, protocols and file extensions that map to either WACH, SEEE, LSTN, or READ.

*The service is still in Alpha stage

Tags: short url, Shortener, URL

CowURL: Personalize Short URLs

CowURL is another URL shortening service. Since a lot of them have been popping out lately due to the increase in numbers of web applications that may require their services (such as twitter), it’s no surprise that some of them are offering something unique in their service. Other services offer something like fusing short URLs together and CowURL allows you to personalize your short URL.

To create a personalized short URL, all you need to do is just paste the extremely long URL on the text bar and press the “Personalize It” button. CowURL will check if the text is available or not. If the text is available, you can proceed with sharing your personalized short URL.

The only problem with personalizing short URLs is that the good ones will probably be taken early. It’s the same as choosing a good domain name. In the long run, users will just have to come up with longer URLs. On the other hand, users can use CowURL to make a description of the page hidden on the personalized short URL. This can be extremely useful when sharing your Facebook profile page. Since Facebook doesn’t provide vanity URLs, you can use CowURL to create something like “myfacebook.cowurl.com.”

*You can also use CowURL like any other URL shortening tool with the random generated URL text.

Tags: CowURL, ShortURL, tinyurl, URL

BackupURL: Create Cached Copy of Any URL

Here’s a simple tool that you can use to create backup of pages that you found online. BackupURL makes it easy for you to create a cached copy of any web page. All you have to do is enter the URL of the page you want cached. What BackupURL does is store that page to their servers so that you can view them even if the site goes down.

This can be useful for creating copies of pages that tend to go down from time to time, that is if BackupURL itself doesn’t go down on you. It can also be used to save data that are often deleted or modified. If you made a comment on a page or a blog post and concerned that it may get deleted or modified by the owner, this might come in handy in providing proof.

You will be given a URL for your cached page and a short URL is also provided for easy sharing on micro blogs. This might not be your everyday app but it’s worth checking out especially for site owners. It might come in handy sometime.

Tags: backup, BackupURL, Cache, URL, Web Pages

LongURL: Make Short URLs Long

LongURL is a service that allows you to see the real URL link hiding behind the URLs generated by link shrinking services such as TinyURL. If you’re thinking that- why not just click link to see the original one? Well, it might be the easiest way to find out but it’s certainly not the safest way, especially if a friend is sending you a NSFW link.

The service can be used in several ways. You can use their site to expand short URLs. Simply paste the shortened link and LongURL will expand it for you. There is also a LongURL Firefox plugin available so that you can use the service anywhere there is a shortened link present (Twitter, Gmail). An alternative to the Firefox Plugin is the GreaseMonkey script. Just load the script on your GreaseMonkey and you’re good to go.

The website plugin is what interests me the most. Website owners can simply add the code (found here) and get an instant LongURL service integrated to their sites. It can be a handy plugin which will benefit visitors who are unfamiliar with the service. Twitter could surely use this.

You can check out the LongURL website plugin in action below. Just Click the expand link near the shortened link to see the original and click the contract to revert it back to tiny mode.

http://tinyurl.com/6286ta

Tags: longurl, tinyurl, URL

Shrink2One: Shrink Multiple Links

Shrink2One is a URL shrinking service where you can shrink multiple links into a single short one. The service is quite similar to FuseURL. The only difference is the way it lets the user view the fused and shrunken URLs. Check out FuseURL’s full review.

Shrink2One is great for jamming together several links that you want to share to your friends. You don’t have to shrink each one on TinyURL before you paste them on IM’s, forums and blogs. This is also great for sharing links on forums and blogs that allows only one link per comment or post. Most blogs only allow one link per comment, anything greater than that will send the comment to the spam list.

Using the service is easy. Just paste all the links on the form provided and click the “Shrink Now” button. Other cool features of the Shrink2One are the optional Title and Password. The title will give the recipient a general idea on what the content of the URLs are. The password, of course, is for privacy. Since the recently created links are featured on Shrink2One’s website, this will protect your links from being viewed by others if you wish to.

If ever you are in need of a service that converts multiple URLs/links into one, Shrink2One is a great place to start. It beats FuseURL with the privacy feature but I like the way FuseURL presents the fused links. Your choice.

Tags: fuseurl, Shrink URL, Shrink2One, URL

Shrinkify: Produce Shorter URLs Using Firefox

Shrinkify is a URL shortening web tool similar to TinyURL and FuseURL. Basically, all of the mentioned URL shrinking tools pretty much does the same thing but with some differences in their approach on shortening URLs. TinyURL, the most popular among three now provides a preview mode for its generated tiny URL. FuseURL however made a different approach by letting users to fuse together several URLs and create a single short URL for easy sharing of multiple sites. So what’s special about Shrinkify? It shrinks better.

Aside from making long URLs short, Shrinkify also provides you with an option of choosing an even shorter URL. They said that it is for people who are very much concerned with the number of bytes they spend on a URL. Below are the examples of the shrunk URL which are produced by Shrinkify.

Short URL:
http://shrinkify.com/7qk

Shorter URL:
http://s7y.us/7qk

Besides producing shorter URLs, Shrinkify’s main features include OS-X desktop, Firefox browser and iGoogle integration. The mentioned features will let you do the URL shrinking without actually going to the Shrinkify website and paste a long URL to make it shorter. You can do it in your Firefox Browser by downloading the Shrinkify Firefox Add-on. They also have a Mac OS-X dashboard widget and a gadget for iGoogle.

Tags: Firefox, firefox add-on, igoogle gadget, os-x dashboard, short url, shrinkify, URL, widget