sites

URL Obfuscation

There are a number of sites that have jumped up to allow you to use a URL for the site to point to your own.  Many of these are for allowing you to use smaller URLs for what could otherwise be a lengthy path.  Of these tinyurl.com seems to be the most popular, a free, ad-sponsored site that litters twitter feeds.  

tinyurl.com
tinyurl.com

Reducing the amount of characters in a database can save a considerable amount of space, according to how many links you have.  It can also allow you to paste links that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to use in sites that don’t allow enough characters for lengthy URLs.  It can also be helpful if you send people links in emails and line breaks cause them to have to reassemble the link.  You can also use this to have people open links without knowing what site they’re actually visiting…  

For fun, there’s another site out there called GiantURL.  GiantURL actually takes URLs and makes them huge.  Therefore it will take more space than it was likely meant to in the initial link.  For example, if you have a short URL, such as https://krypted.com/ to send someone you can pop it into GiantURL, make it huge, more than likely causing them to have to cut-copy-paste or delete characters in the address bar of the browser and wasting their time.  A very nice way to be annoying when you feel like it…

GiantURL
GiantURL