File Under: Why Didn't I Think of That?

Lately, I've not been able to find a tool more useful than TinyUrl. It's simple. You ever have a URL to which you want to refer someone, but you find it is about 300 characters in length? For example, if you've ever gotten a link from Google Maps, you've seen something like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=3+Abbey+
Rd,+London,+NW8+9AY,+United+Kingdom&sll=51.532196,-0.177576
&sspn=0.001176,0.002511&ie=UTF8&ll=51.532073,-0.177332&
spn=0.000588,0.001255&t=h&z=20

Unwieldy and potentially an issue if you email it to someone. (Sometimes email clients tend to word wrap gigantic URLs rendering them useless as a link.) Instead the person is left in copy-paste hell trying to reconstruct the proper URL in a browser -- if they even bother to work with the broken link, that is. Also, if you ever Twitter, you only have 140 characters per post. I'll be damned if I'm using 135 of them for a link. Enter TinyUrl. Paste this enormous URL in and submit it. And it spits out a nice, neat, tiny URL.

http://tinyurl.com/2eznr7

BAM! Clean, concise, and easily fits in any email or Twitter post leaving plenty of room to accompany the link with a brief explanation. You now have a permanent redirect to your URL that is good forever, or at least until Google Maps goes tits up in my example....so effectively, forever.

TinyUrl also offers a browser toolbar to make it even more handy to use. Actually, about the only really, truly awful thing about the service is the fact they link to Ron Paul's official website in the left side navigation. (This would be a good place to insert a contextual link to Congressman Paul's site I realize, but then I too would be part of the problem, you dig?)

The best use of TinyUrl yet is intentionally hiding a URL from the recipient's sight. This is useful for business reasons or just plain old fun.

http://tinyurl.com/2tcnbl

Truth be told, TinyUrl was my second favorite service like this. My favorite was SwiftyUrl. Similar premise, but upon returning a shorter URL for you it also placed that URL into your clipboard. You didn't have to bother highlighting the new URL then copy-pasting the URL anywhere. You're good to go paste it anywhere you want right away. Yeah, may be a bit intrusive for some hard-cores out there having a website insert something into your clipboard, but I found it handy. Also, as a Twitter user, you could follow SwiftyUrl and use them there. Start your post off with @swiftyurl and it would convert any link in that post to a shorter URL. Again, handy.

Now, you educated types can pick up on the past tense here. Something has happened to SwiftyUrl. It's gone from Twitter and the SwiftyUrl website is completely blank. What the hell happened? Perhaps infringing on the TinyUrl premise a bit, not sure. Either way an explanation is due, people. For now, TinyUrl will do nicely.