7 Shortest URL Shorteners

TinyURL, Burn URL et al have been around for a long time. The main purpose of these sites was to accept a long url from the user and return a short url to them, which redirects to the original page. For eg. I submit something like http://www.devilsworkshop.org/10-services-to-shorten-long-urls/#comment-113577 to TinyURL and it returns http://tinyurl.com/n74g63. This will redirect to the original page at DW. However it seems even these url shortners are too long for some people!

1. u.nu

The best feature of this site, apart from its extremely short name is that it isn’t ‘picky’ about upper- and lower-case. ie. http://u.nu/44h43 is the same as http://u.nu/44H43. It also provides a bookmarklet for easy url shortening.

2. x.vu

   This site gives the ability to insert a tag, so that we can personalize the url a little more, for eg http://x.vu/shorturl. x.vu also gives users a widget that they can put on their blog or site so that the readers of that blog can shorten a url on the site itself.

3. 3.ly

It has the feature of user providing the suffix of their choice. The site claims that it will introduce user accounts and stats soon. It also provides icons with your links, just for the fin of it! eg. ? http://3.ly/shorturlDW

4. a.gd

Perhaps the shortest url shortener with the most functionality. It includes options where you can set expiry date of the link, password protect it, give your custom tag and shorten url’s in bulk. For eg. the following url is passwoed protected, http://a.gd/shorturl. You will have to enter the password ‘DW’ (without the quotes’), to access the page it leads to.

5. r.im

A normal url shortener, which has the facility to link your twitter account to the r.im account, and post the shortened url’s directly on twitter. It also shows how muchpercentage of the url has been shortened. For eg. http://r.im/1w5f [71% shorter than http://www.devilsworkshop.org/7-Shortest-URL-Shorteners]

6. z.pe

The best feature of this site is its sleek interface. When you click on the ‘Shorten it!’ button, a cool box slides at the top and shows of the shortened url. Another feature is that since this site is still new, many short url’s have not been generated, so you can get a url as such: http://z.pe/jWt

7. is.gd

   One of the leading url shorteners. At the time of posting, it had shortened 39,301,424 URLs so far. What more should I say?! Eg. url: http://is.gd/2LaSy

These are the shortest ones I found. Liked the list? Have more suggestions? Please do comment!