With the advent of Twitter, some websites have established themselves that offer the automatic service of creating web addresses or shortened URLs to allow Twitter users to share links . An address like "//www.navigaweb.net/2009/12/creare-url-accorciati-e-rivelare-i-link.html" would take too many characters if I wanted to share it on Twitter which has a limit of 140.
Therefore, I go to the Bit.ly website and get the short url "//bit.ly/6rfy9G" which is the same page as a result.
Since Twitter also integrates with all the other famous social networks such as Facebook and Linkedin, it often happens to see this kind of short internet addresses.
In addition to Bitly which is the online service, it shortens the most famous url, there are another 100 all more or less similar including, for example, Tinyurl just to mention the most popular to shorten the links to put on Twitter.
Is.gd is a URL shortener that can be used without registration, useful for sharing links quickly. The best part of is.gd is that you can customize the abbreviated URL, so that you can make it more recognizable. For example, //is.gd/nvgwb is navigaweb.net.
Another site to shorten URLs and Internet addresses, more pleasant and fun, is gat.to, simple and immediate, which allows you to share shortened URLs also via QR code.
Google and Facebook also have their own links to shorten the website addresses to use on Twitter.
Google generates URLs shortened with the Goo.gl service , with counts of clicks on shared pages (has been withdrawn). Goo.gl also works on Feedburner, used by those who own websites or blogs, and usable by the Internet Explorer Google Toolbar.
Facebook instead creates short addresses of the type //fb.me, for now, only if you use sharing links from the mobile version of Facebook, therefore, from your mobile phone.
YouTube videos, on the other hand, can be shared by shortening links with //youtu.be/
Unfortunately, the downside of this useful service is that very often, behind these short urls, spam or virus web pages are easily hidden .
Even if sites like Bit.ly claim to have an internet address control system, it is still easy for an experienced spammer to spread links to unsafe pages.
This problem of the short or short links of the sites behind which you can hide anything, in Italy, however, is not too much felt.
There are still few, in percentage, people who use Twitter in Italy and most of them are web professionals, in the sense that they are expert surfers who can easily recognize dangers and traps.
Twitter is not difficult to use but, for many, it remains difficult to understand and many, of course, ask the famous questions: "but which I should share"> In another article I tried to explain why Twitter is important and works well as a medium all-round news dissemination.
Beyond this parenthesis, going back to talking about short and shortened URLs, there is a way to easily reveal what is behind a link and see which website they lead to, before clicking on them .
To do this, a service called Urlxray is used which can be installed on the browser in the form of a Firefox extension or, on all browsers, as a bookmarklet (button to be placed on the favorites bar). Then entered a page with urls shortened inside (as is that of Twitter), pressing the LongUrlPlease button displays all the short links in their original form.
To create shortened URLs with the push of a button on the browser, you can use Firefox or Google Chrome instead.
With Firefox you have to use an extension called 1 click Url which adds a button next to long internet addresses and turns them, if pressed, into short links of bit.ly.
Also on Chrome there is also the extension to create shortened urls of Google, that of Bre.is, with Short Url .
Bit.ly is perhaps the best of the sites it shortens url (even if now Google could also kill this sector) also because by registering it provides a whole series of statistics on its links, to know how many times they have been visited.
If you have never seen short links and shortened Internet addresses, then surely do not use social networks, neither Twitter, nor Facebook nor Linkedin and anyone else.
