What is shortn.me! ?
shortn.me is a service that shortens URLs such as web addresses and redirects the URLs to optimal versions for regular web browsers, iPhones and other mobile devices. This is useful in many circumstances (see below) e.g. in email clients that break long URLs or text/SMS messages that need to be short.
Unique to this service, you can convert several long URLs into one single short URL. It depends on the type device which URL the visitor will be redirected to.
For example you can turn
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Empire+State+Building&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.339735,40.957031&ie=UTF8&ll=40.750183,-73.985624&spn=0.039989,0.039997&z=14&iwloc=A intohttp://shortn.me/EQ
Preview
Simply add a hyphen (dash) to the end of the shortened URL, and instead of being redirected to the original long address automatically, you'll be taken to a preview page telling you where the link goes.For Examplehttp://shortn.me/EQ-
Uses for shortn.me
Here are just a few of the many uses for shortn.me's URL shortening service:
- Shorten web addresses for emails, forum posts, blogs etc. which cannot handle long URLs and might wrap them, making them unclickable
- Lower the character count when texting web addresses to a mobile phone
- Hide the real URLs of affiliate links from visitors to your site
- If you dislike a website and have to mention it (e.g. when complaining about it), link via shortn.me so that your link does not help the site's search engine positioning
- Clean up bookmarks for social bookmarking sites or sites with low character limits like Twitter
- Obscure your real email address from bots which harvest them to spam (enter an address like mailto:[email protected])