A number of times we come across long Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) on Internet. Pasting these miles long URLs in limited character services (like Twitter allows only 140 characters per update) proves to be a great problem.
URLs containing non-Roman script languages, such as Hindi, also become very long and pose a challenge in printing, pasting and remembering the links. Let me give you an example from Kavita Kosh (a Hindi language poetry website run by me). There has been a great Hindi poetess names Mahadevi Verma. The URL of her page in Kavita Kosh looks like:
If rendered properly
http://www.kavitakosh.org/kk/index.php?title=महादेवी_वर्मा
Without rendition
http://www.kavitakosh.org/kk/index.php?title=%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B5%E0%A5%80_%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE
In either case, you can see that URL is too long to be pretty.
Due to these issues, a lot of companies made URL Shortening Services available online. http://tinyurl.com and https://bitly.com are better known ones.
URL Shortening
In December 2009, Google also launched a URL shortening service which is now available at http://goo.gl . You can go to http://goo.gl and paste any URL that you want to get shortened. Google will oblige. I personally prefer to rely on Google for URL shortening because Google is one of the largest web companies and the chances of Google closing this service are remote. This is important because if such a service providing company shuts down its business –all the URLs shortened by the company will immediately become invalid. So, using http://goo.gl increases the probability of your links remaining active for long. Google also provides performance details about links it shortened for Feedburner service (if you are using it). It tells you which link was clicked how many times in your feed.
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