First of all, what’ an URL Shortening service? URL shortening is a technique used very much lately on the World Wide Web allowing people to create a very short URL and make a web page available on it, in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://www.radupoenaru.com/handle-xml-with-namespaces/ has a length of 54 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters: http://tinyurl.com/mpjxqb .Half the size, same page pointing to!

But hey! Twitter allows only 140 characters – Need to save two characters in a tweet? You either have to use the SMS language – rework your wording by changing “people” to “ppl” or “for” to “4” for example, or, if you want to include a link, you can use a shorter URL. The natural evolution of shortening websites also followed the shrinking idea : Starting with tinyurl.com who had on its own 11 characters, going to bit.ly 6 characters( only half!!!) and finishing with the newest addition, making URLs look like they were getting just a little too long, when Bit.ly introduced j.mp –only 4 characters wasted.

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