I was playing with a web site – is.gd – that gives a shortened URL for a web site. I happened to type in the URL of this web site and that’s what I got: is.gd/rOy.
I’ve used other, similar sites before; tinyurl.com, snipurl.com, come to mind. But is.gd really shrinks them to the maximum.
Why would anyone need that? Well, have you ever seen a URL for something like a Google Map? They’re a mile long. The odds of losing part of them in a cut-n-paste are good. Forget hand-entering them!
But the big users of them are people on Twitter. Why? Well Twitter is practically a SMS service. (Actually can be, if you want.) You’re limited to 140 characters per post. If a URL uses 100 of them, you’re hurting to explain what it is!
So, I though it was neat that it boiled this website’s address down to three letters and spelled a name with them. Tinyurl.com by comparison gives http://tinyurl.com/6fst2o and snipurl.com gives http://snipurl.com/2e775 . You can almost remember the is.gd one.
