URL shorteners are all the rage these days…they allow you to take a really long URL and shorten it to just a few, cryptic, characters. They are must haves if you are posting long URL’s to Twitter or sending them in emails.
And now Google/YouTube has joined the game with their own URL shortener for YouTube videos called youtu.be. Here’s how it works.
A normal URL to a YouTube video looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay9RuFRwH_o
With youtu.be, you can shorten the URL to this:
The catch is that Google/YouTube does not provide any type of tool to do this for you automatically…you must manually hand-code the links. To do this, following the above example, you just replace the “www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “youtu.be”.
What’s the point of Google/YouTube offering this feature when the Internet is already jammed with URL shorteners? Easy. With most URL shorteners, clicking on a link can be risky…you don’t know where that link is actually sending you (think adware, malware, etc.). But with youtu.be, you can rest assure that the shortened URL will be sending you to YouTube’s site.
By the way, if you do want to know where a shortened URL will send you…before you click on it…you can use the free site UnTiny.