TinyURL

Have you ever tried to send someone a link to an item from Amazon.com?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451209710/sr=1-1/qid=1138295809/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5935873-5010568?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Sometimes links can be so long that they break apart in email programs and no longer work. Why do they break? Because a URL cannot have any spaces in it. When a URL spans across multiple lines in an email message, some email programs will add a hard return that breaks the link in two.

The solution?

TinyURL

Tiny URL is a free service at www.tinyurl.com that takes a long link such as my amazon.com link above that was 115 characters and creates a new link, http://tinyurl.com/an9rm, of only 24 characters.

Best of all, the new link never expires. TinyURL has a huge database where they store the old and new URLs together so that if you click on the TinyURL link in 2 years, the link will still work.

Try it yourself!