It was only a matter of time, but YouTube has released their own URL shortener: Youtu.be. This will help YouTube videos be noticed and trusted in social networks worldwide.
The URL shortner will be used whenever some authoshares a YouTube video via liking it, or any similar action. The shortener will only work with YouTube videos, giving it a 100% safety rating. That is, until it is hacked.
But, the best part by far is the backwards compatibility of the shortener. From YouTube: “To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you’ll see it redirects to that video.”
Absolutely brilliant. YouTube has built a shotener that will save space, boost trust, and will make everything a bit simpler.
Best of all, the URL shortener will allow developers to do new things: “because the link contains the ID of the video you’re going to see, developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time”
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This is one of the best URL shorteners that we have seen. Instead of just chopping down a link, YouTube has added a whole layer of capability. Be looking for these links shortly.
Of course, this will take a small bite out of Bit.ly and other leading independent shorteners, but it is still heartening to have the major players using a good idea to better their platforms.
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