There’s a pretty useful spreadsheet comparing different URL shorteners here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pApF4slh39ZkqUOoZQSo8bg .
Tinyurl just really shortens your URL and doesn’t provide any other data. A great feature is the preview option that allows you to preview a link so you don’t get Rick-rolled.
Bit.ly is my favorite service. The features I like are
- its API,
- its analytics, and
- its Pro feature which allows you to make a branded URL shortener
I wanted to figure out just how much effort it was to code a URL so I coded up my own MVC based on Rasmus’ article on making one in PHP, and added URL shortening code to it. You can get the URL shortener I wrote on Github.
Here are a few things that I noticed once I put this code on Seductive.me:
- Somebody found a bad, infinite loop that I accidentally put into the code
- URL Shortener services that offer analytics have to sort out “bots” from real user clicks, and I’m not sure they are correct 100% of the time
- Using CRC32 as my hashing mechanism for shortening URLs will cause a link collision after 65,536 URLs shortened.
- Seductive.me is a lame url for a URL shortener which is why I got 3vi.be the next day.