Everyone is using Twitter as a means to promote their blog posts or articles. Since Twiter only limits each tweet to 140 characters, which doesn’t leave you alot to say you have a new blog post and the title, along with the URL for users to check it out. Thanks to the expansion of Twitter, more and more tiny URL services have been released. Below is a collection of 8 that i have found and used in the past.

Some are the more well know such as Ping.fm and TinyURL, but I found a couple others that do the job just fine. Check out the list below and post if you have any others you use!

TinyURL
Example URL: http://tinyurl.com/c35n8e – 28 characters
Organic URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 27 characters

This is by far one of the mostly used and original tiny URL services out there. Generates a fairly small URL. This service makes it great for posting long URLs on twitter or any other social media service. Shows you the original and the number of characters, which is a nice added bonus. Also allows you to create your own tiny URL alias instead of having the service generate one for you.

Tinyarro
Example URL: http://✩.ws/ꉚ – 12 characters
Actual URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 28 characters

This is a fairly new tiny URL service out there, but what makes this one differen than the others, is that is uses symbols instead of random characters for instance, it uses arrows and stars. There is a dropdown to the left of the input field for your URL where you can choose what symbol you would like to use for your URL.  Once you create the URL, it has a shortened version and then a Twitter preferred version as well. Along with those two, it has a TinyURL version and the original. These are one of the smallest URL’s I have seen.

TinyURL Creator – Firefox Add-on
This uses the TinyURL service but allows you to create URL’s at your fingertips, uses the same great original service. One of many excellent Firefox Add-ons

Ping.fm
Example URL: http://ping.fm/laMe – 19 charachers
Actual URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com – 27 characters

This one is another tiny URL service, but it is much more than that, so I figured it would make the cut. You can register all of you social networks and have them update all at once, which makes this service extemely useful! Post to WordPress, Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, the list is endless. A must see service for you social media junkies.

TURL
Example URL: http://turl.ca/fkhkzw – 21 characters
Actual URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 27 characters

Yet another service, very simple and straightforward, paste in your URL, let it generate a random URL or type in your own alias. The developer also created Pastebin, which is extremely handy for pasting code with syntax highlighting. Supports CSS/HTML/Java/PHP/SQL and much more. Simple layout makes this service very usable.

There is a list of the top 5 services that I have used to help shorten my URLs. This list could go on and on, there is many copy cats out there, but why reinvent the wheel. If you search in Google there are pages and pages of other sites that create tiny URLs. The problem with the smaller ones is that they are flooded with ads. If you have another service for shortening URLs share it and ill add it to the list.