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Social Media Marketing Tools: 11 Tools to Shorten URLS

Posted on Jan 9th, 2009
Written by Lee Odden
In this article

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    11 url shorten

    Update! We have a winner. Cli.gs received 26% (88) votes with budurl.com coming in a close second. Congratulations!

    URL shortening services were initially popular because web addresses started to get long and links would break when sent in an email.   However, as microblogging services like Twitter have become popular, an increasing number of services and applications, including tracking & metrics, have been added to the basic URL shortening features.

    Recently I polled followers of @leeodden on Twitter about favorite URL shortening services and received a great response. Thank you to all who responded! So many people replied that the following mini-review was created of 11 different URL shortening services showing which offer customization options, statistics, 301 redirect and some of the other unique services like export to CSV, bulk shortening and displaying ads to monetize the traffic to links that are shortened. Enjoy!

    Service Customizable URL Tracking 301 Redirect Unique Features
    tinyurl
    tinyurl.com
    Yes No Yes Toolbar button
    cligs
    cli.gs
    Yes Yes Yes Stats are private, real time and very detailed, geotarget URLs based on country of visitor, bookmarklet.
    zima
    zi.ma
    Yes Yes Yes Bulk URL shortening, registration not required for stats, download stats to CSV, bookmarklet, “popular” links page
    bitly
    bit.ly
    Yes Yes Yes Saves copy of page linked to, tracks “conversations”, Twitter search fo uses of shortened URL, bookmarklet, import to Google spreadsheets
    tweetburner
    twurl.nl (aka tweetburner)
    No Yes No Most popular items linked in last hour, bookmarklet, built in to Twhirl
    isgd
    is.gd
    No No Yes Really bleeping short URLs, bookmarklet, Firefox plugin, built in to Twhirl
    snipurl
    snipurl.com (aka Snurl Snipr Sn.im)
    Yes Yes Yes Popular snips, snip search, RSS feed for snips, export to Excel, claim snips before you registered, edit snips
    poprl
    poprl.com
    No Yes No Most POPular links, top domains, public stats, search, must register with Twitter account – boo
    adjix
    ad.vu (aka adjix)
    No* Yes No Optional ads that share revenue, scheduled Tweeting, *use your own domain name as the link URLs, bookmarklet, option to use ad.vu
    trim
    tr.im
    Yes Yes Yes Uses Twitter or identi.ca info for login, bookmarklet
    budurl
    budurl.com
    Yes Yes* No** Detailed, real time stats (*if you upgrade) this is the only service with fees but there is a free version, **uses 307 redirect

    I give an honorable mention to Minnesota based culld.us from Garrick Van Buren as well. Culld appears to work well with basic shortening features and is in cahoots with the Cullect feed aggregator.

    There are others that were suggested like bloat.me and URL.ie but I wanted to keep this review to 11.  If you really need a URL shortening, truncating or redirecting service fix, then check out this bigger list at Mashable: 90+ URL Shortening Services.

    There’s also a great study of URL shortening services in terms of use and popularity on the cli.gs blog.

    I do have a feature request for these services though. A URL shortening service that also posts to Delicious and/or StumbleUpon would be nice. A URL worth shortening is also often worth bookmarking and it would be a nice time saver to do both. Just a thought.

    Now that you have an idea of the different types of URL shortening or redirecting services, perhaps you’ve tried a few and have a favorite?   This leads us to our Reader Poll:

    [poll id=”47″]