Recently, due to Twitter sucess I saw a great increase in the options of URL shortening (or minimizers) services. This are simple services that transforms a big URL like http://www.friedbeef.com/top-5-url-shorteners-and-how-they-help-you/ in http://is.gd/6d7j . This is very important in Twitter since your message should have at most 140 characters. Each service has its special functionalities. Some have plugins for Firefox, Twitter clients, APIs. In some of these services you can choose the URL instead of using a random one. One nice functionality is when the URL can be resolved, so you can see the real URL and maybe avoid getting Rick Roll’ed. Another interesting feature is to allow you to track the statistics of your shortened URLs.

I googled a little and found the following services:

• tinyurl.com - One of the first. It’s automatically used in TwitterFox.

• is.gd - Claims that it delivers the shortest URLs on the net.

• Bit.ly - With this service you can send messages to twitter from the service and track the visitts.

• http://krunchd.com - The most difference of this service is that it can shortens (or better crunching) a list of URLs. Example: http://krunchd.com/sports.

• http://kissa.be - Not only provides tiny URLs for URLs but also for e-mails, text messages and images (this last didn’t work for me).

• http://www.relink-it.com - Relink your URL and earn money with ad-sense (also available in French).

• http://www.yoplink.com/ - One more service where you can make money with your shortURL. Also you can provide tags to the URL (also in French).

• http://cligs.com - Shorten URLs with anaytics.

• http://budurl.com/ - Also horten URLs with anaytics.

• http://poprl.com/ - Show the most popular shortened URLs.

• http://migre.me - Brazilian service (in Portuguese) also shows most popular URLs.

• http://snipurl.com/ - Has an API and also allows shortening multiple URLs.

• http://www.adjix.com - URLs with ads.

• http://tweetburner.com/ aka twurl - also tracks the URLs.

• http://delivr.com/ - Mobile friend shortened URLs.

• http://zi.ma/ - Allow you to define a expiration date and password protect the URL.

• http://urlmin.com/ - In Spanish, also generates a QR-code (for mobile phones).

• http://tr.im/

• http://cozyurl.com/

Well, I’ll stop listing the services here, because Mashable has already listed more than 90 of these services: http://mashable.com/2008/01/08/url-shortening-services/.

The Useless Infinite Loop URL Shortening Redirecting Experience

Now, let’s have some fun. I used some of these services and created an Infinite loop of shortened URLs: http://tinyurl.com/poolinf

The list of shortened URLs is here: http://krunchd.com/6ca94. You just have to take care, because some services don’t allow links from other URL shortening services (is.gd, for example, blacklists tinyurl saying it’s trying to prevent spammers from hiding their links into a chain of URLs)..

Ok, it worked as expected. But it always returns to http://ad.vu/mgwc (from Yoplink.com) because it has an ad-sense with high response time (or maybe it’s using an frame or something like this).

So, let’s try again without these ad services: http://tinyurl.com/infilup

Voilà! After some seconds looping Google Chrome and Firefox (or your browser of choice) displayed a message saying that the URL has an Infinite Loop!

Update: Well, now migre.me service blocked one of the URLs, the first service to detect the infinite loop! http://tinyurl.com/poolinf is still working.

Well, that is useless, but, one utility is to make a lottery. Each people chooses one of the available URLs in the chain. The winner is the person holding the last URL showed in the browser URL toolbar. :-) If you want to win you should probably choose the service that it’s slower to redirect or the service with lower availability (i.e, that can will get you a 404 error).

I don’t know for how long this will work,. If a link in the chain is broken, the loop will also broke.

Using a lot of shortening services is also a good way to hide your Rick Roll URLs: http://tinyurl.com/c6yhwo