TNW ...
Simple Ways to Make Short URL’s Long Again
Not sure about you but i’m sick of short URL’s…endlessly clicking through to find out what your twitter friend thought was “cool”. These are some great ways to save you the time and trouble of clicking through by allowing you to see the true address behind that ghastly tiny url.
1. Tiny URL’s built in preview feature.
TinyURL.com has a tasty little feature which places a cookie in your browser and lets you automatically redirect to a ‘preview page’ before revealing the actual page that the tinyurl redirects you too. Not much of a time saver it has to be said, but if you’re main issue with tiny url’s is security – this is a definite help.
2. Use Embiggen the bookmarklet to expand TinyURL’s.
Embiggen is a bookmarklet which lets you view the real url’s of all the nasty tiny urls on the page. Simply drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar and it will automatically change all TinyURL’s into the original URL. Unfortunately it only works for TinyURL and not the plethora of other services out there.
3. Use LongURL
LongURL is a much needed tool which lets your preview shortened URL’s from basically every short url service out there. It’s available as both a firefox extension or a greasemonkey script and allows you to hover over tiny URL’s from across the web and view their URL’s there and then.
4. Preview Thumbnails of Tiny URL’s
PrevURL tries to take things a step further by allowing you to preview the URL of the site before actually visiting it. In my opinion, it’s a pain in the backside – particularly as there isn’t a bookmarklet to go with this. However, if you’re security conscious then this may be ideal for you. Copy and paste the URL into the field available to you at prevrl.com and a second later you’re viewing the preview of the page you were about to visit.
My personal favorite without any doubt – LongURL
via FriedBeef
I prefer using search.twitter.com to check for replies instead of twitter.com/replies because it lets you “Expand” TinyURLs in Search Results. Don’t know why they haven’t included that in the normal Twitter interface yet…
I never saw it as a problem till I read this post. Whenever it starts to annoy me, I know what to do ;-)
Polish microblogging/messaging service http://blip.pl has solved this following way: whenever they shorten url they display it as word [link] and in title HTML attribute put full URL – so when You hover on link You can see where it points. If this is link to other message in Blip itself in title is put whole message – so when smbd is citing other person You don’t have click to check what was said.
I miss such features in Twitter…
I wish I had seen this a while back…I ended up just creating my own, simple way of previewing where shortened urls redirect to, but I also included “how” the url redirects so that you can see if it is a 301 and passing “link juice”. The tool is available at http://urlsnoop.com .
Hey there – This is a great place
Just registered and wanted to say hello.
http://www.ashleymadison.com/A15682