{"id":802,"date":"2009-12-23T12:16:24","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T16:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/?p=802"},"modified":"2009-12-23T12:17:58","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T16:17:58","slug":"google-releases-youtube-video-url-shortener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/23\/google-releases-youtube-video-url-shortener\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Releases YouTube Video URL Shortener"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>URL shorteners are all the rage these days&#8230;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&#8217;s to Twitter or sending them in emails.<\/p>\n<p>And now Google\/YouTube has joined the game with their own URL shortener for YouTube videos called <strong>youtu.be<\/strong>.  Here&#8217;s how it works.<\/p>\n<p>A normal URL to a YouTube video looks like this:<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ay9RuFRwH_o\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ay9RuFRwH_o<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>With youtu.be, you can shorten the URL to this:<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/ay9RuFRwH_o\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/youtu.be\/ay9RuFRwH_o<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The catch is that Google\/YouTube does not provide any type of tool to do this for you automatically&#8230;you must manually hand-code the links.\u00a0 To do this, following the above example, you just replace the <strong>&#8220;www.youtube.com\/watch?v=&#8221;<\/strong> with <strong>&#8220;youtu.be&#8221;<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What&#8217;s the point of Google\/YouTube offering this feature when the Internet is already jammed with URL shorteners?<\/strong> Easy.\u00a0 With most URL shorteners, clicking on a link can be risky&#8230;you don&#8217;t know where that link is actually sending you (think adware, malware, etc.).\u00a0 But with youtu.be, you can rest assure that the shortened URL will be sending you to YouTube&#8217;s site.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, if you do want to know where a shortened URL will send you&#8230;before you click on it&#8230;you can use the free site <a href=\"http:\/\/untiny.me\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>UnTiny<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>URL shorteners are all the rage these days&#8230;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&#8217;s to Twitter or sending them in emails. And now Google\/YouTube has joined the game with their own URL shortener for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[397,396,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":809,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions\/809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}