These days, links around the Internet pretty much come in two flavors: super short, and super LONG! We’ve all seen link URLs that go on and on in our browser’s address bar, and experienced trying to delete 100’s of characters, while wishing the backspace key would work faster! We’ve all seen the likes of platforms such as Amazon and Ebay, with their infinitely long URLs, and if you have tried to email these links, you might have experienced URLs being cut short, and as a result, rendered useless to the email recipient.

According to CNET, in about 2002, one of the first URL shorteners, TinyURL came about. At the time, I would guess that most people could not see the point in having a short URL. It’s not exactly common knowledge that email line-length is an actual specification by RFC 2822 or RFC 5322 that says “There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.” (check out Dan’s Mail Format Site if you don’t believe me ). However, as the social web came about, and Internet users started using short messages such as Tweets and Facebook status updates, users quickly discovered that the 200 character URLs were just not working anymore. Twitter saw this, and hooked up with bit.ly as a URL shortener, and an array of different URL shortening services sprouted up.

Take a look at this article on CNET, that lists a number of the different options for URL shortening. With all these options available, what’s the difference between all of them, and what do should you look at when deciding which to use? Here at YOUffiliate, we are currently evaluating the best option to use for URL shortening. Here’s some of the considerations we are looking at to make our decision.

• Length of the URL – Because our ads must fit in a Twitter 140 character message, we need to ensure our links are as short as possible. Thus, URL length is extremely important to us. For example, URL shortener is.gd (http://is.gd) advertises itself as “The Shortest URLs Around”, and at 5 characters, it pretty much is as short as you can get… until you find j.mp (http://j.mp), and realize that you can save 1 additional character! Services such as MooURL (http://moourl.com) are not options for us, as the domain itself already chomps 10 characters of our 140 character limit.
• API Versatility – As YOUffiliate’s URL shortening happens automatically behind the scenes, API access for creating short URLs is important. Do some research on the API accessibility of your link shortener, if this is important to you.
• Statistics – Some link shortening services offer real-time tracking statistics. Be wary about using these statistics as fact. I’ve read many cases where the tracking numbers appear very skewed from the actual number of clicks actually received.
• Stability / Reliability – If you are running a service that relies on links being up at all times, you had better choose a link-shortening service that is reliable. Read the reviews before choosing, and don’t be the first big site to use a brand new link-shortening service…unless you really believe in them.
• Usage Terms of Service – Some URL shortening services such as Bit.ly (http://bit.ly) list in their fine print that “you may only use the Site for your own personal and non-commercial purposes”. Commercial usage for these sites may require an additional agreement, and some can be quite expensive. (bit.ly PRO Enterprise is $995 /month!)

Other options:

• White-labeled services – Check out bit.ly PRO, which offers “’end-to-end branding,’ which replaces the bit.ly domain with a custom domain name (like nyti.ms).” This may be more costly, but it is definitely an attractive option for those that need it and can afford it.
• Roll your own – How hard can link shortening really be?? If you’ve got the guts, go for it! Depending on what your needs are, and how short of a URL you really need, this may be a viable option for you. Unfortunately, domain names with short names (ie. 4-5 characters long) are extremely rare to come by now-days. If you have a reasonably short domain name, you can probably crank out your own link-shortener fairly easily!

We’ve just set up our new YOUffiliate blog.  Stay tuned for more !